For the better part of a century, the ghoulish mugs of Universal Studios’ Rushmore of classic monsters have been plastered across lunch boxes, transmogrified into Halloween costumes, and stuck on cheap collector’s cups.
The lineup is legend: Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, and The Creature (from the Black Lagoon); but almost always absent, even from Universal’s exhaustive thirty film box set, is The Phantom of the Opera (1925).
It could be that Phantom is an outlier – an epic, gothic, silent film, filled with technical experimentation – or perhaps it’s because it was never serialized like the other classic terrors. After all, Abbott and Costello never “met” The Phantom.
The likely truth of the matter is that the 1925 version of The Phantom of The Opera slipped into public domain in 1952, severely limiting its earning potential. But Universal did go out of its way to include the 1943 Claude Rains remake in its most recent home video sets, so they do consider Erik the Phantom to be one of the motley crew.
All of this is to say, that watching The Phantom of The Opera, now nearly a hundred years after its release, is a little like actually catching sight of a ghost.
Across the misty moors of film history, Phantom presents a peek at the silent era that immediately eschews any assumptions that silent films were all quaint, comedic endeavours, and is instead a shadowy, tragic and towering piece of work, full of massive scope and aching melodrama. It is also the template on which the classic cinematic tellings of Dracula, Frankenstein and the rest, were assuredly based—not just story beats and vaunted imagery, but also in the simple fact that The Phantom, himself, turns out to have a shockingly human soul.
The Phantom of The Opera started as a serialized novel in Le Gaulois magazine, published between 1909 and 1910, written by lawyer turned drama critic, Gaston Leroux.
The novel was inspired by rumours surrounding the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris, where the story is set. A fire on the opera house roof that caused a chandelier to crash into a captive audience, and an underground lake that actually exists (and was used to train firemen), both made their way into set pieces in the novel and film.
Both novel and movie traverse much of the same dank tunnel: the Palais Garnier is seemingly haunted by a ruthless ghost (Lon Chaney), who kidnaps Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin), an understudy soprano, with whom he has fallen into a romantic obsession.
Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Norman Kerry) makes up the third part of this grotesque love triangle. He plans to ferry Christine away, after she’s given an ultimatum by the Phantom to never see Chagny again, or for both to meet their fate at the Phantom’s hand.
Arthur Edmund Carewe appears as the man with the fez, who initially seems to be in cahoots with Erik the Phantom, but turns out to be police inspector Ledoux, the man who reveals the Phantom’s sorrowful human origin. In the film, Erik is a deformed, escaped criminal, tortured during a recent revolution in the very subterranean chambers he inhabits – chambers which bear striking resemblance to the Transylvanian castle in Tod Browning’s Dracula.
The Phantom plays the organ, which is probably the first hint that he isn’t an actual ghost, but instead a mortal man with an artist’s soul. This is highlighted even more so in the novel, where he is given the nickname The Angel of Music and plays the violin at Christine’s father’s grave.
In the book, Erik was a member of the Opera House’s construction team, having built his lair to watch the Opera from afar, which one can’t help but see as a reflection of Gaston Leroux himself: a theatre critic who became an author.
On the page, the story comes to a melancholic end when Erik lets Christine and Chagny escape and dies alone before Christine can make her promised return on Erik’s death day; but, of course, when Hollywood got a hold of that ending, the torches went up and the climax became a blue-tinted ode to mob justice, just like Frankenstein in the following decade.
Although much of Phantom’s imagery shows up in later films, some striking and indelible visuals will come as stunning surprises.
The opera house itself towers over hundreds of extras, both an imposing monolith as an exterior and an all-encompassing, glittering temple on the inside.
Ballet dancers are backlit like ephemeral snow-white fairies, and the silhouetted shadow of a gnarly hanged man is splashed across the wall as a crew member lifts the stage curtain.
In one key scene, the Phantom, his robes hand-tinted red against the blue night (a technique used throughout the film), clings to the side of an oversized stone statue while eavesdropping on our unsuspecting couple and writhing in sorrow. It’s like something out of an EC Horror comic printed thirty years later.
The film also contains an early example of two-colour Technicolor, meaning actual early colour film (as opposed to the aforementioned hand-tinting), during a lavish masked ball.
And, of course, when singing the vast technical praises of The Phantom of The Opera, one has to pause to appreciate The Phantom’s make up, designed by Lon Chaney himself – the melted, skeletal features, with sunken eyes, and jagged teeth, and a seemingly fixed, screaming howl, revealed by Mary Philbin in the movie’s most famous scene.
So, when the Phantom pokes his head out from behind the theatre curtain and you’re certain you caught a glimpse of a cinematic spectre who’s missing his own slot in the collector’s set, what do you do? Well, with ghosts, seeing is believing, so you grab a ticket to see The Phantom of The Opera at the 30th edition of the Vintage Film Festival this October!