The Phantom of the Opera (1925) Review

At last, it’s October once again and let’s talk horror. Going on for another year is always exciting to me because I get to talk the evolution of the genre. With this one, it practically started everything for Universal and I was surprised by that. As always, I’m talking about a silent film to kick things off.

1. Haunted Opera House

        It’s always something to see when watching a silent film. We are so used to how everything is shot and set up in any movie nowadays where it’s whiplash when seeing something extremely quaint. This is no exception. Based on the book by Gaston Leroux, I can assume that a lot of people weren’t aware about that since any pre-conceived notion of The Phantom is with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. 

        We follow the Paris Opera House as they present the new season with their production of Faust. Strange occurrences happen that affects both actors and management, with one actress in particular is the target of the Phantom. I’ll talk about the main highlight in a little bit, for now let’s at least appreciate what the film did. 

        With the version that I saw, yes there are multiple versions which I will also get into. Particularly, there was multiple instances where we see color appear in a mostly black and white film. Now, during that time, color was used to represent the mood of the scene. Like yellow would represent a sunny day, blue would be night. With this film, the colors differentiated the locations. The opera house being bathed in gold for instance. While where the Phantom lived is mostly white with black.

        Aesthetics like that were important since the medium was still in its infancy. There’s one detail that is near the end of the movie where there’s a change of color like in a kaleidoscope until it changes to red to represent heat. More so that as I mentioned before, there’s no sound. How actors acted was mostly through their body language. To represent what they were feeling or what was affecting them. No actor represented that more than Lon Chaney. 

2. The Phantom

        For the uninitiated, Lon Chaney was dubbed The Man of a Thousand Faces. You’ll know why in a moment. He was born with deaf parents and was one of the first to use the American Sign Language to communicate to them. One of the most famous parts that he played was of Quasimodo in an adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His role in this film cemented him as a star. 

        Of course, when we first see him in the beginning, he wears a mask. I was at least expecting that he would wear half a mask since that specific look is now in the pop culture. Anyways, he acts like a ghost since he’s covered in black. Practically being the reason why the Opera House is allegedly haunted. In one of the versions that I’ve seen, the opening minutes has him lurking in the catacombs. His shadow reminded me a lot of Nosferatu. 

        I think the reveal of his real face is one of the most famous moments in silent films. Reading from various sources said that when that reveal happened, a lot of people ran out of the theater or fainted. And I can’t blame him, the makeup on the Phantom is grotesque. Just how he emotes ranges from child-like to unfurled with rage. It’s something else when he put on the makeup before the shooting his scenes, a holdover when he did the same thing when he was Quasimodo. 

        Aside from his monstrous look, I think his most famous look is both astonishing and a technical achievement. The whole scene is colorized, with everyone having a different costume. Then comes The Phantom, whose real name is Erik. Comes out as covered in red and practically crashes the party. It’s such a stark contrast when we’re mostly seeing everything in one color, and we have this scene with a full spectrum.

3. Legacy

        The biggest takeaway for me is always the changing reception when the movie came out and when it’s watched decades after. I think it was ahead of the curve in terms of story and with Chaney’s character. Contemporary reviewers hail it as an all-time classic, so much so that the National Film Registry inducted it in 1998. To say that the film isn’t important in the grand scale of horror is mistaken. Without the success of the film, Universal wouldn’t be home to many of the horror adaptations stemming from Dracula and Frankenstein. A franchise and a genre wouldn’t have grown and spawned a vast sub-genre within the realm of horror.  

4. Overall

    When looking at a place to start for American Horror, this is the one to start.