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- Long Beach resident Evan Halleck is using social media to chronicle his mission to amass the world’s largest collection of “The Mummy” on VHS.
- His one rule is that he must acquire tapes through visits to actual bricks-and-mortar stores.
- In just a few months, he has collected 330 VHS tapes of “The Mummy” and has future plans to turn his adventures into a comedic documentary.
It’s probably safe to say there’s only one person in the world who would spend a Wednesday morning sitting barefoot in the sand watching Rick O’Connell search for the ancient lost city of Hamunaptra on a TV/VCR combo at the beach. And that person is Evan Halleck.
A 34-year-old former commercial editor and VFX artist who worked on “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” Halleck is an industry name you’ve probably never heard of, but those who spend a lot of time online might recognize his social media pseudonym: @MummyManiac.
Feeling creatively stifled, Halleck quit his full-time job last summer to pursue his goal of amassing the largest collection of “The Mummy” on VHS. The 1999 film starring Brendan Fraser has been one of Halleck’s favorite films since childhood and was one of his earliest motivators to pursue a career in film.
On Instagram and TikTok, Halleck is chronicling his quest to collect copies of the film through visits to thrift shops and record stores around Los Angeles and Orange counties. He also hunted for tapes in Denver and kicked off this year with a three-week tape acquisition road trip from his home in Long Beach to Vancouver, British Columbia.
His haul to date: 330.
“I thought this could be a fun, midlife-crisis-style project that grew increasingly more absurd,” Halleck tells The Times. “Just this idea of a guy who’s creatively confused with his career, so his next objective becomes giving it all up to drive around collecting ‘Mummys.’”
Social media loves a bizarre stunt
@MummyManiac launched March 1 with a minute-long video that amassed more than a million views on Instagram in under a week.
The reel is a whirlwind of highlights from Halleck’s road trip to Canada. He’s seen exercising at rest stops to “prepare for all ‘The Mummies’ [he] will catch that day”; watching the movie on a 22-inch tube TV in the snow; and bringing a tape to an Egyptology museum in Silicon Valley to “show a mummy ‘The Mummy.’”
Newer @MummyManiac content shows Halleck lifting weights with dumbbells constructed out of moldy “Mummy” tapes (“When you’re lifting the weight of cinematic history, that’s when the grind gets real,” he says in the background).
He’s a stan for ‘The Mummy,’ not Brendan Fraser
Halleck is not just intent on making his love for “The Mummy” known, but also on stipulating that his fandom extends only to the 1999 Stephen Sommers film and its 2001 follow-up, “The Mummy Returns.” He refuses to include in his collection Universal Pictures’ earlier supernatural Egyptian films, starting with “The Mummy” from 1932 starring Boris Karloff.
As Halleck explains in one video: “I’m a ‘Mummy’ collector, not a ‘Mummy’ Cinematic Universe collector.”
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At this point in his quest, Halleck has watched “The Mummy” at least 150 times and claims “it gets better with every viewing.” But nothing compares to the first time he saw the film in Orland Park, Ill., when he was 8.
“I vividly remember walking out of the movie theater and feeling very excited. In my opinion, it had everything a movie should be: funny, scary, adventurous and comedic,” Halleck says.
Nostalgia also contributes to his soft spot for the film. The horror elements of the PG-13 movie were thrilling to a boy on the verge of adolescence — think frequent battle scenes, implied death by scarab beetles, partial nudity and fatalities from guns, swords and acid salt.
“The Mummy” was released when video rental stores prospered, and people were reminded to “be kind, rewind.” Halleck remembers nagging his parents to visit the video store where he marveled at the abundance of films on the shelves. It’s why he decided to collect only VHS of the film and not DVDs.
Years before his quest was a kernel of an idea, Halleck was purchasing VHS copies of “The Mummy,” thinking it would be funny to fill an entire bookcase in his living room with just tapes of his favorite movie. As the collection grew, he sensed a more preposterous project.
@MummyManiac blurs the line between comedy and reality
Halleck’s deadpan delivery and absurdist antics make for compelling comedy, but his most ridiculous shenanigans for @MummyManiac contain morsels of truth.
He is racking up miles on his 2016 Subaru and dipping into his savings to grow his collection. He once convinced a bar in Silicon Valley to play “The Mummy” on every television screen in the establishment, and the crowd that sat down to watch the film on his TV at an Oregon beach wasn’t made of actors.
Halleck says pursuing this project is “the most creatively alive” he’s felt since moving to L.A. 12 years ago to start his film career. After a decade of experiencing extreme career highs and lows, he’s eager to have something tangible to take pride in.
“The No. 1 artist in the world can be debated, but you can’t debate my physical collection,” he says. “I want the glory and honor of being No. 1 in the world at something, and it doesn’t matter how dumb it is.”
Universal Pictures built its legacy with horror movies featuring Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man during the heydays of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and ’40s.
Halleck’s fiancée, Marla Schulz, is not a fan of “The Mummy,” but she has been aware of her partner’s love for the film since one of their early dates to a “Mummy” movie night at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in downtown L.A.
Halleck’s humor as @MummyManiac is so intrinsically a part of his personality that Schulz is happy to see him find an outlet for it, especially because it means there’s less time for him to pull pranks on her.
“He just commits so hard to his bits in a way where you’re suddenly like, ‘Wait, is this still a joke? Or have you now become the joke?’” Schulz says. “He has these insane ideas and is very creative, and those are some of the things I’ve fallen in love with him for.”
The internet has been less tactful. Trolls love to proclaim, “This guy needs to get laid.”
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The majority of responses, however, have been supportive, with fellow fans of “The Mummy” hyped about, if not in awe of, Halleck’s quixotic dedication. Many have offered to send him tapes from their own collection, prompting Halleck to rent a P.O. Box.
Lots of people are obsessed with VHS
The dogged pursuit of a solitary VHS is no new concept. The artist collective Everything is Terrible collects “Jerry Maguire” tapes and an Instagrammer in Florida known as @titanicfan_97 has turned his entire home into a shrine to James Cameron’s “Titanic.”
Although quantity is tantamount for all three VHS collectors, Halleck believes his mission is different.
“‘The Mummy’ is an action-adventure-horror film,” he says, “and ‘Titanic’ is a romantic historical drama based on one of the worst tragedies, and ‘Jerry Maguire’ is a sports romance.”
Brendan Fraser completes his comeback with a 2023 Oscar for his transformative, but controversial, lead performance in ‘The Whale.’
Halleck sees his project as a Homeric odyssey of sorts, less about the destination than the journey.
“If I wanted to buy out eBay, I could, but there’s something funny about being on the streets and getting respect that way,” he says.
Halleck has spent anywhere from 25 cents to $14 for a copy of “The Mummy” and has trained to quickly scan shelves for the film’s orange-and-black spine. If he doesn’t see other ’90s action films such as “Armageddon” or “Jurassic Park” at a store, he likely won’t find “The Mummy” either. Visiting stores in large cities is usually a waste of time. In San Francisco, he went to 22 stores in one day and left empty-handed.
The ‘Brenaissance’ is a blessing and a curse
In the film’s first year, Universal Pictures released more than 7 million VHS tapes of “The Mummy,” so statistically there should be an abundance of tapes to be found. The problem for Halleck is that the film has remained popular, especially among millennials.
A modern-day “Brenaissance” ushered in by a 2016 Change.org petition to “bring Brendan Fraser back” successfully relaunched the actor’s career. New roles and a long-overdue Oscar win brought renewed attention to the star and his earlier films. (Fraser declined to comment for this story.)
“The Mummy” is a particular favorite among Fraserheads. Multiple fan Facebook groups boast more than 100,000 members, and there is no shortage of “Mummy” memes circulating on social media.
Capitalizing on “The Mummy’s” popularity, Blumhouse Productions is releasing a horror adaptation of the film in 2026.
Despite being 26 years old, “The Mummy” starring Fraser is still frequently rented at the last remaining Blockbuster in Bend, Ore., with staff regularly screening the movie in-store.
A man parked his motorcycle on the sidewalk Saturday morning, ruining the aesthetic of the last remaining Blockbuster in the continental United States.
When Los Angeles video store and independent movie theater Vidiots reopened in 2023, “The Mummy” was among the films shown, and the film was screened again in 2024 with a follow-up talk by an Egyptologist from the Getty.
“It’s just a cozy movie for millennials,” says Lucé Tomlin-Brenner, manager of the Highland Park video store Vidéothèque, who first watched the movie after attending homecoming.
“There’s a coming-of-age experience with the film that is tied so tightly for people even though there’s not a lot to read into it critically other than Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser being hot,” Tomlin-Brenner says.
Film writer Chad Collins, 30, published a love letter to “The Mummy” on its 25th anniversary.
“I’ve always thought parts of our personal stories were the stories we grew up with, and for me, there’s a clear tether between my worn-out VHS copy of ‘The Mummy’ and the work I do in horror writing now,” he says.
The film also helped Collins find love. When his now-boyfriend learned they were both fans of “The Mummy,” he took it as a sign Collins “was the one.”
How many copies of ‘The Mummy’ are enough?
By the year’s end, Halleck hopes to amass around 1,000 tapes. He has fantasies of building a pyramid with the tapes on the Hollywood Walk of Fame or at the Venice Boardwalk and inviting onlookers to take photos with Evan’s Famous “Mummy” Pyramid. But his end goal is to create a comedic documentary about the project.
Road trips to Las Vegas and the East Coast are next on his docket, but those journeys are on hiatus until after Halleck and Schulz marry this month.
Like “The Mummy,” their wedding will take place “in the sands” (of Joshua Tree, not Egypt). A rack of the groom’s VHS collection will serve as an optional photo backdrop, and Halleck is dressing as Fraser’s white shirt and gun-holstered character for the Friday night pre-wedding dinner.
Although Schulz and Halleck’s baby plans are still far off, Halleck has already received permission from Schulz to decorate the nursery with an Egyptian theme.
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