Keeping Mum: A Custom Monster High Mummy and the MH x Universal Monsters "The Mummy'" Doll

This post started with a custom project...and that may never have finished if it hadn't become clear Mattel was dropping competition! This is a review of a new mummy doll by Monster High now too, as well as the original plan of detailing the mummy I designed from an older doll of theirs.

When deciding to rebody my Skullector Bride of Frankenstein back in 2023, I reacquired the Create-a-Monster Mummy for the first time, using her wrapped body sculpt for the Bride and keeping the head and wig separate. I always liked the CAM Mummy more than that, though I was never too satisfied with her canon design. Her purple hair and her awfully ugly dress didn't serve her well.

Not my photo.

Like, the hieroglyph design is fine, but the cut of the dress, the graphic style, and the colors are all immensely unflattering and aesthetically weak.

I then ordered the doll again last year in 2025, thinking I might put my Reel Drama Cleo onto the sculpt and give her a death mask of her own face for added creepy imagery, inspired by this fanart interpretation of Cleo as a decayed corpse with a wig and golden mask restoring her living appearance:

Credit to unusualgrimm on Tumblr.

This idea fell through when I found cutting another Cleo's face off did not make a sufficient elegant mask over the Reel Drama head, and the colors were off. The CAM body is sculpted entirely wrapped, so it had no need to match Cleo's grey skin (and indeed, it deliberately doesn't match the CAM Mummy's grey head, either), but the hue of the CAM body was too greenish for the color palette of Reel Drama Cleo, and the gold plastic marbled into the CAM body was too reddish for Cleo's very yellow accents. I realized I could take these ideas into developing the Mummy into a more cohesive character of her own, and I found that a spare Inner Monster faceplate fit well over my first Mummy head and could be the death mask I wanted. The Inner Monster plate used for this doll is the blue mask from the Spooky Sweet Mood Pack, a remnant of an abandoned attempt to create a custom character with an IM base.

(Oddly, the two CAM Mummy heads I had seem differently molded or cast, perhaps as a manufacturing variant, because the second Mummy body's head did not fit snug into the mask even a little bit, seeming too thin and small for it, while the first head fit it beautifully.) 

Making this corpse-dressed-up mummy concept on a CAM doll also worked better because these dolls have removable wigs, authentic to both living Egyptians and a desiccated mummy who can't present well with natural hair. Ultimately, this doll, even bald and unmasked, still looks conventionally attractive enough that she doesn't serve as a super strong disability analogue for a person who uses wigs or masks/prosthetics to cover up an atypical appearance, but it was still fun to give a character two faces while exploring Egyptian burial themes and fashion. I still think it works that she would sometimes favor a mask and wig to make her look more lively. It can't be easy going from life to preserved unlife, especially if your results aren't as lifelike as the de Nile ghouls'. They struck the jackpot, while even the factory CAM design is more mummified-looking than the de Niles.

Here's the nude base CAM Mummy doll...technically. Since she's all wrapped up, it's arguably impossible for this doll body to be considered nude.

I made an attempt to dye the Mummy wig black, but it didn't work out well. The fiber is kanekalon, and I think the heat damaged it and the rooting got completely out of order where I couldn't make head or tail of how to re-comb the hair to the way it was, so I threw it out...and then fished it back out to harvest the wig's cap. I could use that to apply my own hair to, so I got the cap bald. I put the cap in bleach to remove the dye so it wouldn't stain the doll. This is what it looked like after, stained reddish for some reason.

The wig cap warped in the pot and got bent in on one side, but it wears correctly on the head. I corrected the shape later by putting it on the head, boiling the head and cap assembled to soften the vinyl, and then tossing them in the freezer to reset it. I was also willing to wait and get a new wig to get bald, or a saran wig that might be dyeable, if needed. I wasn't committing to the wig yet because I wasn't committing to finishing this project soon. I proved so uncommitted that it took most of a year's time! I did find the cap was too long in front of the head for the doll to be able to wear the mask at the same time, so I cut a bit of the cap off in front until both pieces could be loaded onto the head simultaneously. This wasn't an issue for the Inner Monster heads, wigs, and masks, but putting an Inner Monster mask on a CAM head and wig combo is different, evidently.

I did what I could and worked on repainting. I took off some of the factory paint on the head (the one that fit in the mask!) for the lips and the corners of her eye makeup, and sprayed on sealant. I also sprayed over the mask. For the mask, I found the most effective way to recolor the base was with gold Sharpie. Some watercolor pencil work later ended up scraping away layers of work and sealant and cutting through the gold, and I had an issue with the sealant never really getting toothy over the vinyl head's face, but I powered through. For the head, I emphasized grey and shadows to make her look more corpselike without going gory or grotesque. I shadowed around her eyes in black and heavy rings of grey--the former to darken the spaces where the mask cutouts were wider than the eye paint. I drew a black ankh on her left cheek, and shaded a little bit of grey on her cheekbones to sink in her face, as well as coloring in her nostrils to make her nose look withered. I kept the eyebrows, but went over them in black to make them look more drawn-on, and her lips became dark grey. I changed her irises to white to make them look more like the eyes in Egyptian artwork, and added gold Sharpie reflections in her pupils, which was just the right touch of color and eeriness. On the mask, I gave her blue lips and Egyptian eye makeup with bands of teal and red, and a red teardrop jewel in the same spot as the ankh underneath. I wanted the expression of the mask to be a little bit haughty, and gave her swirl-ended eyebrows. I think the contrast of mask sculpt and head sculpt is actually to the benefit of the concept, as if suggesting she was full-faced in life, but is more gaunt as a corpse.

Rooting the wig cap, I used embroidery material--black cord for a braided look and gold to shoot through.

The wig cap stalled for a long time. Long enough (many months) for Mattel to announce a mini-collection of licensed dolls revisiting Universal Monsters and making the Mummy for the first time!

These dolls are unusual in several ways. For one--they're revisiting and totally re-adapting two characters who already got their Skullector dolls. 2022 was the year of Universal back in the days when Skullector released very slowly, and Count Dracula got a solo girl doll, while the Monster was one of two male Skullectors to date, paired with his Bride. Seeing them back with new designs is odd. Dracula seems particularly useless as we've already had a female version, though I welcome a girl Monster after we've had the more direct adaptation. And new Dracula's face is awesome.

This series is also unusual for not being a Skullector set--something I didn't even realize until I got the Mummy and Monster in-hand. Their price and retail availability made sense all of a sudden because these are just like the Wednesday dolls. Mattel evidently has a secondary "retail/playline licenses" avenue, and such dolls are nos clearly all branded as "Monster High x [License]" rather than "Skullector".

Given that Monster High x Wednesday has just had its third wave revealed, I hope this means Monster High x Universal Monsters will have multiple waves until we get them all! I'm open to an alternate Black Lagoon doll so long as she has the 2024 head mold. I might like her more than the Skullector piece. An alternate Bride of Frankenstein could also be exciting. Getting the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, and Invisible Man would also be great, even though each and every one will be a girl. 

This new collection may also be a response to Jakks Pacific being known to have a line of horror-themed fashion dolls upcoming, which sounds a lot like a retail attempt to compete with Skullector and license horror properties Mattel has avoided, like the most famous slashers. Mattel locking down Michael Myers, a character I might have expected Mattel to never do, might also be a response to the Jakks line. (Please tell me I don't need Skullector Michael. I don't need her!)

I'll get into the Mummy's review soon, but I had to interject with an introduction to her doll right here before discussing the rest of my custom, because the Universal Mummy landing in the middle of my project was how things went. I actually received the doll I photographed slightly later.

This new Universal line approaching quickly kicked me into gear to get my own Mummy finished. Mattel's Mummy having the white and gold noir aesthetic I dreamed of also kind of pushed me to recalculate where I was going with my own doll. Mattel got the noir look first, though my death mask paint wasn't following that anyway, and I really had no concrete plan for the costume. At this point, I was ready to just finish the doll with whatever I already had.

I grabbed the unofficial white basic dress that's been floating around a couple of my dolls and some Cleo and Nefera de Nile pieces from G1 and G3, including parts I got for my Cleolei restyle who I rechristened as a new character. Dressing my doll up, the colors were a poor match for the mask, so I sanded it down to be repainted to match the colors of the jewelry. It might make the ghoul more colorful than I planned at first, but the first mask paint wasn't super noir either. I got a good match for the gold and changed the makeup colors, while turning the jewel circular to suit the change of colors. I also cut the wig shorter and finished the rooting. To seal the mask and give it gloss, I had to get some new warm-toned polyurethane. I also touched up the face paint on the head and made her gold eyelights more striking.

The doll's neck joint got rebuilt several times until I got a stable assembly that fit right. I also considered an alternate outfit for her darker mode.

Here's the finished doll!

She's wearing G3 signature Cleo's headband, collar, and belt, and G3 signature Nefera's snake cuff and scorpion ponytail band on her legs, while carrying G3 Nefera's purse. Two copies of G3 Nef's pyramid bracelet are slid up her arms. I gave her Thronecoming Blondie's blue earrings (had to pierce the ears) which match her vibe so long as you don't look close at the sculpted details. I ended up with G1 Gloom Beach Cleo's fan, too, which works nicely with her.

The fun thing about the embroidery cord fiber of the wig is that it can be shaped and held in a flipped silhouette or a straighter one, almost like she's bouncier with her full glam on and more reserved with her face exposed.

When re-fitting her neck joint, I couldn't keep from squeezing the doll head and wrinkling the sealant layers, but it's acceptable as decomposition skin issues on a mummy doll.

Were I to try this again, I'd dye the doll head a much darker grey before any paint work, and probably do away with the sealant because I'm more comfortable having doll heads I can squish if needed, and can do fine with just acrylics. Making the head darker would increase the contrast of unwrapped and wrapped body parts, and would make her look more like a real mummy whose skin has gotten very dark. I can try getting another head, but unfortunately, I couldn't know if it fit the mask until I had it in-hand. 

Here's the mask close up.

The doll looks good bald and maskless, with earrings.

I really like the Egyptian style of colorful jewelry over a simple white dress, and wish any official MH dolls went with that look, but I also wanted to give her a second combo. It wasn't reasonable to make her a full noir look after deciding she's a ghoul who dresses colorful and lively to resume her former identity, and the mask and jewelry were not made colorless, but using spare G3 Nefera pieces (with one colorful sash removed from an earlier idea) worked well for something darker. This look swaps the necklace and earrings for Nefera's scorpions and G3 Robecca's gold chain (ignore the clock), and shifts the bracelets down the arms.

I do have the Create-a-Monster Mummy shoes (the Mummy was the beneficiary of the one pair of shoes Mattel included in the Gorgon/Mummy pack), and can complete her with fewer pieces if I want her palette to center around her uncovered face.

I didn't keep the CAM shoes in her kit, though.

It's fun to have a mummy doll you can dress up in different ways, exploring the ways the dead were honored and dressed as their living selves. After all, this doll is just this underneath it all:

One of my foundational childhood scares was from the Magic Tree House book series, in the book where Jack and Annie end up in Ancient Egypt. They meet an Egyptian queen or noblewoman and all seems lovely, until they learn she's dead by finding her mummy in a sarcophagus and the book doesn't mince words describing her corpse. It's a freaky scene, but might be a major aspect in my interest in horror and the morbid. That contrast between the dead mummy and the person they were and are being remembered as is the core of this doll, but I wasn't even operating on that connection for most of it.

Time for a bio. Haven't had to write one for a while!

"Linnet" (true name secret) Wosiri

Monster Parentage: I have no monster parents. I am a monster by chance.
Killer Style: I wear the clothes I was buried in and things that remind me of home. My wig and my death mask bring back some of my living traits that make me feel comfortable.
Freaky Flaw: I'm prone to getting wrapped up in activities to the point of complete distraction. Many others have less time than I've had, which is hard to adjust to.
Biggest Pet Peeve: I am annoyed whenever others tell me I look better without my mask and my wig. I understand the intent to make me comfortable and confident, but it is my choice how to present myself, and my preference shifts at a moment's notice. It's not as easy for me as you may want.
Favorite School Subject: History. I want to join archaeologists in the future and represent and discover my own people's stories. 
Least Favorite School Subject: Drama. I dislike the pressure of acting, and on days where I feel I cannot be unmasked, it is hopeless.
Favorite Food: Perhaps my tastes ought to be more extravagant, but to me, there is nothing more divine than bread with honey.
Pet: I had a pet once, but she was resurrected by Bastet as a ghoul in my class! I'm more than happy to call Maupet my friend today.
Best Friends: Maupet A'Duat, Operetta

I had to bring Maupet back around. She found her former owner! 

The doll's hair looked to be poorly aged since I last handled her, but it boiled perfectly a second time. This doll has miracle hair. It looked like a mess when I got the Cleolei doll in the first place, but boiled perfectly in 2023, too.

Linnet's name is not Egyptian, though that's not for a lack of trying to find something that fit. Egyptian women's names are less documented by history, and what I found didn't have anything that felt like it could cross over to the world of Monster High names. I decided her true name is unknown, either because she keeps it private in the tradition of the Ancient Egyptian "secret name", or because it has been lost to time. "Linnet" is an invocation of "linen" and "Linnet Ridgeway", the inciting murder victim of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile. "Wosiri" is a permutation of "Osiris", the Egyptian god of the dead.

I think the real secret weapon of Linnet's design is her golden eyelights. She'd be an entirely different doll had I left them out, and even though none of her paint is perfect, the golden dots snatch your attention and add just the right supernatural touch.

The Universal Mummy arrived the same day I got the supplies to finish the custom by sealing her mask, though finishing this post took more time. The day the Mummy arrived, I returned home to also meet the first day of an extended storm power outage. The work I was able to do was very limited in that time. I also had a minor basement flood to majorly clean up that night--major because it required the total dissection of the furniture layout to remove an old rug that had to go anyway, but now really had no chance after getting soaked on one end. There was nothing else I was both able to do and in the mood for after that. This started Monday, and Wednesday, I was back in power when I returned from work.

The new Universal boxes all go together while keying the graphics and colors to the individual monsters. The Mummy's is golden and displays the tomb.

The back of the box has a closeup and some text copy.

Calling the Mummy nameless couldn't be further from the truth. The original 1932  film very clearly establishes that the Mummy himself was a man named Imhotep. I'm getting concerned by recent blatant inaccuracies on doll boxes. Is AI doing the research? The copy uses no she/her pronouns, though I think the use of "it" is for that old-timey "oh the horror; the monster!" tone, rathet than to imply the character is genderless or uses genderless pronouns. Might also be a way to not explicitly mention the doll flips the character to female. Now I'm curious how Dracula's box reads.

I suppose I could call this doll Tepi as a nickname, but she feels more like a vibe on the concept of the Universal Mummy rather than a direct homage to the character as portrayed in the defining film.

Here's her backdrop out. The dolls come with stands, but unlike the Wednesday series, the bases are not a custom mold for the UM collection.

Here she is unboxed.

Of the new Universal trio, the Mummy is exciting just for being the first Monster High go at the character while the other two are getting their second licensed adaptations, but she also stands pretty strongly just as a visual design. It would be interesting if the Mummy flipped the dynamic and also got a second doll, with her second being Skullector, rather than the first.

Here's the doll next to Reel Drama Cleo.

Tepi is pretty, but she kind of looks like a white person next to Cleo. The pale coloring and the hair matching the wrappings, plus its shaping, all make her look less like an Egyptian. Not every Egyptian was a native citizen, and there was a wide spectrum of Egyptian phenotypes, but styling the new Mummy a bit more culturally proper couldn't have hurt. 

The hair is really where my confusion comes in. 

It starts with a hair decoration of a linen bandage-shaped bow barrette, from which one of the sheer printed grey wrappings of this costume hangs.

It doesn't make much sense for the loose hanging strips of this costume to be printed with the layered-bandage pattern of the rest. I like the color-wash detail on the bow, since that kind of paint is rare from Mattel, but the bow shaping feels out of place for this doll and context. 

The hair shape itself is also odd. A side-part does her no favors in terms of Egyptian flair. This pale hair and side-part almost feels like a hypothetical misguided first draft for Cleo de Nile that someone would have rightfully shut down because that was too whitewashed even for the early 2010s.

The hair is pale grey with a few blonde streaks to blur the hair with her yellowed grey-white bandages. It's the good silky fiber that wavy collector dolls get to have. Playline dolls are stuck with low-quality saran. Wonderfully, there is no tinsel in this hair.

I really want to find this doll a better hairstyle.

"Face card" is not a part of my day-to-day vernacular, but I swear the bank is funding these new Universal ghouls, oh my lord. Debt-free for the rest of their unlives. Look at this.

She's got wide eyes with smoky dsrk eyeshadow above and gold lining all around and a kohl-esque swoosh on the upper lid. Her irises are golden with a slightly orange/amber tone, and her eyebrows are appropriately black and drawn-on in appearance with a very quirked sharp look. Her sclerae are not flat white, and have a shaded effect.

How can I convey that in no way do I want to literally kiss these lips, but metaphorically, I do? I don't know if I've ever liked a doll's lip paint more. This metallic gold is just stunning and the shaping is great. It's the best part of the doll design. The lips are subtly two-toned with pure black at the ends and metal gold in the middle, but they blur together perfectly.

Linnet makes a career on the gold in her eyes, but the Mummy's faceup essential is her golden lips.

Her cheeks are sunken with airbrushed grey contour, and she has normal-looking ears with no piercings or jewelry. Her face has some passing similarities to the G1 de Niles, perhaps, but is a new mold stamped 2026.

Her head tilt is totally nonfunctional. She needs neck surgery badly.

The Mummy's costume is a two-layered single-piece dress, with an opaque core of a sleeveless sweetheart dress over a high-necked sheer puff-shoulder sleeve element which covers her arms. Sheer bandage strips hang from the sleeves amd the front of the dress. Plastic ties tacked down a few, but if they were meant to be attached, they'd be sewn. I removed the tags.

The belt has the same wrapping effect as the hair bow, and the buckle is a bronzed gold tone that the rest of her accessories share.

The Mummy has a ring, which is a rarity for MH. It's a scarab and slides on a single finger with a full loop on the underside. The doll has gold-painted fingernails, too.

The Mummy's monoprint outfit is fittingly hard to parse into separate clothing silhouettes, but she has two clearly separate stockings with different amounts of trailing bandages. Her sandals look like bandage wraps on the front, and transition into Skullette-faced mummy portraits on the heel-less back. This is better than a tacky figurine heel.

To steal an old pun from Gary Larson--it's the mummy's purse! And the purses in this line are as good as the faces. The Mummy's is a sarcophagus.

The hieroglyphs look like bat wings, a scorpion, a rat, and a Skullette, and can't correspond to real Egyptian hieroglyphs as a result. Shame. This could have been a way to hide a name for this character!

Inside the purse are some molded scarabs!

The purse looks best to me in the doll's left hand so the feet of the sarcophagus can point behind the doll, but the handle slides off the hands easily. The ring on the left hand stops this from happening, so perhaps swapping the ring to her left is the answer.

I tried tying the Mummy's hair into a ponytail.

Maybe? I think I found the real answer by simply taking out her hair tie and accessory, letting the hair hang loose. I think the loose hair removes some of the tonal dissonance from the design and emphasizes the decrepit, tattered-banadge vibe the hair was always meant to evoke. The belt doesn't need the jarring hair bow to match it and balance it out. The loose hair also looks more 1930s-glam, like Veronica Lake gone ghostly. The tied hair felt too much like a peppy highschool girl. If she can't look like Egyptian fashion, she can at least embody the cinematic aesthetic of her movie's era.

The hair can also look more decrepit this way, and I honestly like displaying this doll's hair messy!

To not discard the hair clip, I just put it around one of her sock bandages.

I considered making a death mask for her from another Inner Monster piece, but ultimately, I don't think her hair and costume suit the masked look, even with a simpler, less-painted face. And this doll's face is so lethal that covering it feels wrong. I did give her neck surgery, and her neck is still underperforming, but I can actually move it side-to-side and forward and back.

To shoot the cover, I did my best to assemble a noir crypt suited to the Universal doll, with gold and silver and curtains, including one made from eye-patterned fabric. A few other accessories trimmed the scene. The closest MH has made to a sarcophagus is the G3 Cleo Gore-ganizer case, which looks good, but wasn't worth pursuing. It's not a fitted piece designed only to enclose the doll herself, and is recognizably a portrait of G3 Cleo and her two pets.

I settled for a silver Living Dead Dolls coffin lid on legs, in which Linnet could sit, while the Mummy sits on the edge. There's nothing securing the coffin lid to the legs, so this was a touchy display that collapsed a few times.

I edited out the cool colors. Here's another take, which deemphasizes Linnet too much for a cover shot.

And a group photo with Reel Drama Cleo added in.

The Universal Mummy is on the edge of Bratz with her face paint, but I don't hate it.

Here are more pictures with her in this set.

I did one photo of Linnet here, but it wasn't really her scene.

Linnet looks better against colors, since that's the vibe she intentionally cultivates.

Here she is at her dressing table, putting herself together.

Linnet's modified rebuilt neck joint tilts really far, so her neck can look creepily slack.

I haven't quite captured the eerie horror of a mummy in an expressionless golden mask because the eyeholes remove some of the creepy factor. If this was a totally opaque mask with a serene still face on a shambling corpse, it'd be much more unsettling. 

Here are some more portraits of Linnet--I restaged the crypt when I designed a composition of her mostly "unwrapped" in the coffin--her body covered with a band of canvas because Tumblr censor AI wouldn't recognize that she's technically not a nude figure and I wanted to be able to share something from this shoot in the promo post.

And against a simpler backdrop.

And a few more fashion-combo photos.

I had a lot of fun with this custom. There are flaws in the paint and sealant that I'm not happy with, and I should have thought of dyeing the head darker, but I like the result I got. Having a doll who can be built multiple ways and display multiple "modes" or personalities while reflecting Egyptian burial and perhaps even the experience of someone who uses aesthetic aids to cover for an unconventional appearance, is all really cool. I enjoy the tactile play features of the wig and mask as removable parts that really change Linnet's look, and giving her two faces such different vibes was a good idea, too. Linnet is complete regardless of how much she's built, but the feeling of completeness and comfort changes for her based on the day or the situation. I like that story for her, and it suits a doll designed to change up her look and layers. I think a design like Linnet's would have been a fun doll concept, maybe after the de Niles were established and held the premiere mummy roles in the brand. 

The Universal doll is a gorgeous mummy with a baffling factory hairstyle. Just letting the hair out helps a lot. 

She captures the white and gold moody look I've wanted from a mummy doll for a long time now. All that being said, being a good tribute to the monster-movie look doesn't make her better than Cleo. This style would have been the wrong choice for the mummy character in the playline core cast. Cleo is less monstrous than I'd personally like, sure, but she provides better visibility and diversity even in the G1 incarnation. She looks clearly Egyptian, while her look is iconic and enjoyably colorful. I love a deathly-white gilded ghoul. Love her. But this would have been a mistake to make into the aesthetic of the principal playline mummy. Even Reel Drama Cleo wouldn't be correct. The G1 Cleo we got was good for her purpose in a way the noir mummies, and even my custom, aren't.

I have the Frankenstein Monster in-hand and in process right now, but I might have to get Dracula too in case the MH x UM line continues into a full series. I don't want to miss the chance to have them all if every Universal Monster gets a doll in the new line! Stay tuned for the Frankenstein Monster soon, plus my look at a trio of Moonspell Magic dolls!