Director Stephen Sommers (center with viewfinder) on location in the Sahara near Erfoud.

"He's unstoppable," says Fraser, noting that the millennial Mummy is a lot fiercer that the early thirties version. "He just gets angrier the more I try to stop him with my shotgun. I guess that's why he's undead."

But, while the names remain the same, a lot else in Sommers' script is quite different. "I loved the original Mummy," he says. "It was the one horror movie as a kid that scared the hell out of me. But why try to re-make it? I'm not really interested in Gothic horror movies: they've sort of been done to death. You have to make it more exciting, more adventurous and, I think, more romantic."

Bringing the awe-inspiring world of The Mummy back to life on the screen has been the responsibility of Industrial Light and Magic, the Academy Award-winning creators of the visual effects for Men in Black, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Twister. "Their creativity and knowledge are just spectacular," says Sommers. "I've had some bad experiences with special effects in the past. I'm used to asking people, 'Can you give me this and this and that?' and them saying, 'Well, how about just this?' But with ILM I say, 'Can you give me this, this and that?' and they say 'OK, and how about this as well?' It's just above and beyond anything I expected."

O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and Jonathan (John Hannah)
retreat before a horde of flesh-eating scarabs.

Sommers was not alone in wanting to bring Imhotep back from the (un)dead: producers Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel had likewise been interested in doing a new version of The Mummy for some time. So, when Sommers hooked up with them, things really began to move.

"We thought Steve had an interesting take on the subject," recalls Jacks. "It was more of a hell-bent-for-leather, action-adventure movie with horror in it, but also very much a swashbuckler like the old Errol Flynn films. "Our version of The Mummy is very romantic," he adds. "We want it to be an adventure with a lot of humour. But," he adds, "definitely not a comedy."

Although The Mummy is very much set in the land of the Pharaohs, the political climate in modern-day Egypt made it impossible to shoot a major movie there, so the decision was taken to film the complicated location sequences in Morocco. Marrakech thus provides the casbah and bazaars of 1925 Cairo, while the ruins of the lost city of Hamunaptra were constructed inside the crater of an extinct volcano near the small Saharan town of Erfoud, situated in the south-east of Morocco, near the border with Algeria.

O'Connell and Jonathan in the City of the Dead.

Filming in the desert was never easy: the temperature was up to 130 degrees by 10 o'clock in the morning and rose to 145 degrees by early afternoon. But the footage obtained made it all worthwhile, reckon Sommers and the producers, particularly the opening battle against the Tuareg and the scenes of Fraser and Weisz racing across the desert on camels.