You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of The Phantom of the Opera. Whether you’ve been in the orbit of a theatre kid who’s probably seen its musical adaptation, the longest-running show on Broadway, or you’ve seen a glimpse of the iconic half-mask in a Spirit Halloween, the story and iconography of the Phantom haunting the Paris Opera House has persisted across stage and screen. The latter started (in Hollywood, at least) with Universal Pictures’ 1925 adaptation, which premiered in theaters exactly a century ago.
Universal’s version of The Phantom of the Opera may not have been the first adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel (that honor goes to the now-lost German adaptation from 1916), but it remains one of the more faithful retellings. Ingenue opera soprano Christine Daae (Mary Philbin) rejects her lover, Vicomte Raoul de Chagny’s (Norman Kerry) marriage proposal to focus on her burgeoning opera career. Simultaneously, she begins tutelage under the “Spirit of Music:” the titular Phantom, Erik (Lon Chaney), who has become obsessed with her. A love triangle ensues, which includes, as horror in the Gothic tradition tends to do, kidnapping, torture, and murder.
As with many films that hit their 100th birthdays in the past decade or so, 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera is a landmark entry in film history. One of the film’s largest impacts is how it altered the trajectory of horror’s place in the Hollywood film ecosystem. While The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) is the true impetus of founder and producer Carl Laemmle’s stock in the horror genre, the success of The Phantom of the Opera proved that horror films had a home at Universal Pictures and were quite successful moneymakers at that.
As is true today, horror films can be produced on comparatively small budgets. Phantom was made on about $650,000, a figure easily recouped at the box office. Including a 1929 re-release, Phantom wound up making over double its budget. The critical and financial success of Phantom of the Opera would eventually lead Laemmle and his son Carl Jr. to continue producing horror films into the sound era, thus creating the iconic Universal Monsterverse.
Arguably, Phantom is the first entry in the earliest pantheons of Hollywood horror; although it is rarely lumped in with the iconic films of the early sound era, the adaptations of Gothic horror would come to define the studio to this day.
Part of why The Phantom of the Opera was so successful a century ago, and why I’d argue it remains influential to this day, is due to Chaney. A former vaudeville performer, Chaney joined Universal Pictures in the 1910s, typically working in bit parts. However, Chaney particularly hit his stride with The Hunchback of Notre Dame when he played double duty as both Quasimodo on screen and his own make-up artist behind the scenes. In the early days of cinema, make-up was rarely used beyond enhancing an actor’s eyes and lips, similar to how it was used on stage. Chaney’s work as a one-man special effects department was the first of its kind.
Chaney’s skills as both a creature actor and special effects artist made waves in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and earned him the role of the Phantom. Using a color illustration printed within the original novel, Chaney created the Phantom’s iconic look by stuffing his cheeks, putting guide wires and putty in his nostrils, and strategically placing contouring. Allegedly, when Chaney’s make-up was revealed for the first time on set, the cinematographer Charles van Enger lost focus.
His famous skull-like visage for the Phantom wasn’t only a practical marvel in 1925. His methods would come to serve as a base for the practical special effects that have come to define horror films. Monster movies defined the early years of Hollywood horror, and Chaney’s work in Phantom set the stage for the effects techniques used on subsequent monster actors, including Chaney’s own son, Lon Chaney Jr., who, in 1941, played the Wolf Man in Universal’s iconic monster film The Wolf Man.
Of course, the success of The Phantom of the Opera also resulted in countless adaptations, enough to have a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to them. Yes, technically, these are adaptations of Leroux’s novel, but most take inspiration from the 1925 film rather than the book, including Universal’s own remake in 1943 starring Claude Rains and reusing many of the elaborate sets created for the 1925 film.
While the film has since been partially eclipsed by its contemporaries, both film fans and institutions alike recognize the massive impact The Phantom of the Opera had on the horror genre and the Hollywood system alike.
Editorial Courtesy of Red Broadwell
Feature Image to Universal Pictures via Turner Classic Movies
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