"The Mummy's Hand" introduces Kharis in a series of flashbacks that are pulled from the original 1932 film (except for inserts with Tyler replacing Karloff in shots in which Karloff would have been conspicuous). The film "The Mummy", which was released eight years before "The Mummy's Hand", tells the story of the high priest Imhotep, who is punished for attempting to resurrect a dead lover, and thousands of years later returns to the Earth as a living mummy. However, in "The Mummy's Hand" the mummy is a high priest named Kharis and the details of the story are changed to describe a similar but alternative scenario. For this reason, the Kharis films are not sequels to the original, as occasionally misperceived.