13 Nights of Shocktober: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

by A. J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 1: Silent Horror Night: “Feast your eyes! Glut your soul on my accursed ugliness!”

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

I always like to include at least one silent movie in my Shocktober viewings. While they lack the violence and intensity of modern horror movies, they are rich in eerie, moody atmosphere and spooky visuals. The Phantom of the Opera (1925), is no exception. Though not as widely seen as other silent horror films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922), The Phantom of the Opera contains one of the most famous and instantly recognizable shots in film history. Even if you’ve never seen this silent version of the Phantom story, you’ve likely still seen the image of a young woman unmaking the Phantom revealing his disfigured face while he plays the organ. Upon the movie’s initial release this moment reportedly so shocked some audience members that it caused people to faint. Those claims may or may not have been part of a marketing scheme, but, then again, it should be kept in mind that audiences in those days were not accustomed to such visual scares.

Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera tells the story of a mysterious masked figure who haunts the Paris Opera House and uses sabotage and murder to make the object of his obsession, Christine, a star. Lon Chaney plays the titular Phantom and he created and designed the special makeup effects the character himself. His visual transformations from film to film made Chaney known as “the man of a thousand faces” and with his look as the Phantom he created his most famous face. The big reveal of the Phantom’s face comes at about an hour along and the movie does a good job of building up suspense and mystery for that moment.

Mary Philbin plays Christine, an opera singer whose career is on the rise but her suitor, Raoul, wants her to marry him and give up the opera. Christine does not want to trade the opera for married life and finds herself under the spell of a mysterious admirer. She doesn’t realize that her secret admirer and the dangerous Phantom are one in the same. 

The sets of the opera house and the Phantom’s lair in the catacombs are extravagant and impressive. Color filters were commonly used by all silent movies to convey time of day or setting (yellow for outdoor daytime scenes, blue for night scenes), but in silent horror movies these color filters also add an eerie, surreal feeling to the scenes. This is certainly true for the scenes of the Phantom taking Christine to his lair beneath the opera house. Stylish visuals abound on their descent, from Christine riding on horseback through the catacombs to the Phantom rowing a gondola. The visually impressive scenes above ground come at the Bal Masque de l’Opera, which are in two-strip technicolor. The color looks unreal, especially happening so late in an otherwise colorless film. It also shows off the costumes and sets nicely. There is even a mysterious person in red wearing the mask of a skull claiming to be the Red Death; a nice reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

The Phantom causes all kinds mayhem at the opera house for the sake of his obsessive love: leaving threatening notes, lurking in the shadows, forcing the producers of the opera to give Christine the lead instead of the current prima donna, and dropping a chandelier on the audience. This may not seem like the stuff of horror movies, but Chaney’s grand performance as the maniacal, menacing Phantom, along with his makeup effects, create a film of shocks and thrills. If you haven’t seen many silent films, horror or otherwise, The Phantom of the Opera is a good place to start.