‘The Mummy,” the new gorefest fea turing Brendan Fraser, is the latest in a long line of movies about the ancient gentleman wrapped in gauze. Dating back at least to the 1930s, they range from ‘The Mummy’s Curse,” ‘The Mummy’s Hand” and ‘The Mummy’s Shroud” to ‘Mummy vs. the Human Robot” and ‘Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

But for atmosphere, class and subtlety, none comes close to director Karl Freund’s 1932 ‘The Mummy-,” which has just been re-issued on home video.

Boris Karloff is at his creepy best as the rotting, 3,700-year-old mummy Imhotep, who stalks ’30s Cairo (actually the back lot at Universal Studios in Hollywood) in search of the reincarnated Egyptian princess Anck-es-en-Amon, portrayed by the sultry Zita Johann.

We had the honor of interviewing Johann a few years back before her death in 1993, at the age of 89.

Speaking from the house in Rockland County, where she had lived since 1938, Johann told us that shooting ‘The Mummy” had been an ordeal, due entirely to the ‘sadism” of Freund, who had started his career as Fritz Lang’s cinematographer in Germany and ended it behind the camera for TV’s ‘I Love Lucy.”

‘Freund was really a cameraman. This was his first job as a director. He was very insecure,” Johann reported.

‘The first thing he said to me – he didn’t say hello or anything – was, ‘In one scene you have to play it nude from the waist up.’ He wanted me to say, ‘The hell I will,’ so he could blame everything that went wrong on me. But I told him, ‘It’s all right with me if you can get it past the censors.’ ”

The scene was never shot.

Johann said that Freund treated her so badly that, at one point, she blacked out on the set. ‘I was worn out with his sadism,” she recalled.

So she told Universal boss Carl Laemmle that she wanted nothing more to do with his studio.

As a result, Johann said, many of her best scenes, showing her in other reincarnations through the centuries, were cut from ‘The Mummy.”

If we’re lucky, the trimmed footage will one day turn up in the Universal vaults.

n Ann Sothern, the longtime screen and TV queen who turned 90 in January, is the subject of an 11-film retro running through May 16 at the Museum of Modern Art. Movies range from ‘Let’s Fall in Love,” made in 1934, through the 1987 ‘The Whales of August.”

n Fred Astaire is in the spotlight at the American Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria, Queens, which is hosting a five-weekend, 18-film tribute to the dance legend. It includes all of Fred’s pairings with Ginger Rogers. Thankfully, those sacrilegious posthumous commercials for Dirt Devil will be nowhere in sight.

V.A. Musetto is film editor of The Post. He can be e-mailed at vam@nypost.com