Last Friday on this blog I presented an article saluting some of the most iconic horror movie masks. My first pick chronologically was the “Red Death” costume Lon Chaney’s Erik dons in 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera. As chilling as Erik’s skull-faced headwear was, that wasn’t the one he was best known for in the Universal silent shocker. The Phantom is seen throughout the film wearing a half-face/half-cheesecloth mask over his face as he roams the hidden passages and catacombs of the Paris Opera House, seeking vengeance on his perceived enemies and pursuing the woman he secretly mentors, beautiful novice singer Christine (Mary Philbin).
Roughly a half-hour into the story (shortly after the Phantom halts a performance of Faust by dropping a massive chandelier on the audience), Erik summons Christine. He takes her–via horse and boat, no less–to his subterranean lair “five cellars underground.” After he confesses his feelings for her, Christine discovers the coffin he sleeps in and realizes her strange Svengali is in fact the Opera House Phantom. “If I am the Phantom,” he says in one of the film’s intertitles, “it is because man’s hatred has made me so. If I shall be saved, it will because your love redeems me.”
As Erik tells her of his tragic past, Christine faints and he carries her into the lavish boudoir–complete with boat-shaped bed–he’s prepared for her. She awakens to discover a note which reads in part, “You are in no peril as long as you do not touch my mask.” Hearing hauntingly hypnotic organ music outside, she finds the Phantom playing an original composition, “Don Juan Triumphant.” Even as he tells her that within the score “there sounds an ominous undercurrent of warning,” a curious and spellbound Christine has decided that she must see the face of her mysterious captor.
Slowly creeping up behind Erik at the organ, Christine reaches her hands up towards his head, only to abruptly stop when it looks as though he might see her. Remember, this was 1925, when the horror film genre was basically a handful of Chaney efforts and several European films. As such, the tropes today’s fright fans are used to–like the “false start reveal”–were still gestating.
Unafraid, Christine reaches out a second time. As she moves the camera angle abruptly shifts to looking full on at her and Erik. And then…
Oh, that face. It is indeed “the face that launched a thousand screams,” as I’m pretty sure Forry Ackerman must have said in a Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine article. We see the startled Erik’s skull-like features before Christine does, and as he turns to confront her she recoils in terror. This apparently was also the case among audiences in 1925, as there were reports of theatergoers screaming and fainting in their seats. Even the sudden blurring of the camera does little to soften the shock of Chaney’s self-created “grotesque” makeup. As an enraged Erik slowly walks down to his captive–his hand oustretched in an accusatory gesture–the camera angle again changes. Now the audience sees a floor-level shot looking up, as Christine would, at the hideousness that is the Phantom.
“Feast your eyes–glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!,” Erik exclaims as, laughing, he grabs a weeping Christine and turns her head so that she’s looking right at his deathlike visage. “Oh, mad Christine, who would not heed my warning!,” he laments. She pleads with him to let her go back to the world of the Opera one last time. A heartbroken Erik consents, on the condition that she never again see her lover Raoul (Norman Kerry) and eventually return to him.
When his Le Fantôme de l’Opéra was first published in serial form in 1909-10, there’s a good chance that French author Gaston Leroux considered the possibility of its becoming a motion picture. After all, films had been around for over a decade by then. What’s more, his countrymen Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers were thrilling audiences by bringing the fantastic to life on the screen. Leroux signed a production deal with Universal boss Carl Laemmle in 1924 and not only lived to see the movie, but had begun work on writing a sequel, The Return of the Phantom, before passing away in 1927.
More than a century after its New York premiere, The Phantom of the Opera is considered a milestone in shock cinema, with the unmasking scene its highlight. The sequence’s influence can be seen over the years: the Monster’s first appearance in 1931’s Frankenstein; Hélène removing the cloth from her husband André’s head in 1958’s The Fly; the reveal of Christiane’s face in 1960’s Les Yeux Sans Visage; and many more. Leroux’s novel has also been filmed many times since (most notably Universal’s 1943 remake and a 1962 Hammer version) and of course was a Broadway staple for over 30 years. But it’s Chaney’s unforgettable face will forever be associated with the title role.