He agrees to release her to sing again but she must never again see her former lover ( Norman Kerry). It is just obsession and resentment-the Phantom is the original stalker. The Phantom’s emotion is not really love, of course. Then she pulls his mask off, revealing one of the most iconic, horrific make-ups ever. And he plays a pipe organ, a device which has been copied by a million movie villains since. She is thrilled at first, but gradually becomes uneasy as she sees the weird mask he wears and he leads her deeper and deeper into a remote sub-basement of the theatre, five levels down and then across a “black lake” which evokes the River Styx… into his sumptuous subterranean apartment (a trope borrowed for everything from the Batcave to V for Vendetta). When the rival sings, a HUGE chandelier falls on the audience.
He terrorizes the company in order to promote the career of a girl he loves ( Mary Philbin) – forcing the producers to let her sing lead parts, and threatening her main rival, the company’s prima donna ( Virginia Pearson). At the same time, there is a mysterious man who frequents the opera he always hides his face and rents the same box. We hear of rumors of occasional sightings of a mysterious Phantom who lives beneath the theatre. But in the event you’ve encountered neither… Chaney devised his most famous make-up for his portrayal of the Phantom, first among a career distinguished by too many memorable guises to count (although I doubt it was actually a thousand, as his promoters claimed).ĭo I need to run down the plot? If you haven’t seen the film, you probably know the 1986 Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. I would speculate that horror runs second only to comedy as most-watched silent film genre nowadays. The original Phantom is handily one of the first silent movies I was ever exposed to and I expect I am not unique in that regard. This seemed a fitting day to do my planned post about several of the significant adaptations of Gaston Leroux’s 1909 novel. Tonight (tomorrow morning, really at 12:45am Eastern) Turner Classic Movies will show the 1925 horror classic The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney.
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