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I'm trying to find a believable reason for someone to open a clearly cursed tomb for my short story. I'm finding myself between the silly-but-different and believable-but-boring spectrum. For example, a historian or researcher might open it just for scientific reasons. But that's not too exciting. On the other hand, a completely farfetched but cool reason wouldn't feel real, and this is supposed to be a mystery/horror story.
Any ideas come to your mind?
For something completely different, Crazy religions fanatic.
We already have Westboro Baptist Church that performs baptisms and conversions of the dead against their will, but at least from a distance, so for horror take it another step.
Have a religious organisation unhappy that someone was burred with Egyptian rituals instead of Christian ones. This is particularly bad for them because of the importance of the individual, and perhaps this pharaoh's mention in the bible. So they want to break in, desecrate the Egyptian gods, perform a baptism on the mummy, and then rebury him as a Christian.
Wealth. Digging up tombs to loot them is a time-honoured human activity.
In trying to explain any kind of stupid human behaviour, you can always count on the old reliables: ego, sex, wealth, and religion. People will do all sorts of dumbass things for one or more of those reasons.
The person wants the valuables inside.
He purely want's to desecrate it because his is a highly religious person of a other faith who thinks that Pharoahs who functioned as a bridge between the (in his eyes false) gods and the people is heresy.
He believes he is the descendant of the pharaoh and therefor the rightful ruler and hopes to find some evidence of this inside the tomb.
He's an hopeless romantic who wants to get a engagement ring.
He is being chased and believes that entering the tomb would be the only safe spot (Because the chasers believe in the curse and won't follow him in)
