We’re now just one month away from the Buff’s annual 31 Days of Halloween season, and as we say goodbye to the Summer 2016 and welcome in the fall, its a perfect time to reflect on one of, if not the very first horror movie created by Hollywood.
It’s impossible to provide an in-depth review and standard grade for the 1925 silent picture “The Phantom of the Opera” for a bevy of reasons. The acting is unidentifiable due to the distance of the shots and the lack of spoken dialogue by the characters. People nowadays would go insane having to wait ten seconds after every scene starts to read the placard explaining what is happening.
The setting is nice; the historic Paris Opera House makes for a perfect backdrop though most of the shots appear to be stock footage and again are out of focus and suffer the effects of color limitations present in the era.The plot is one of a common theme we find at various levels of movies for the last hundred years, bearing a striking similarity to “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” in particular. A deformed musician known as the phantom haunts the shadowed halls of the opera house, while falling in love with a beautiful young starlet that he could never actually have.
What makes the movie virtually unwatchable is the abhorrent circus like music that plays loud and constant over the entire movie. Since this music is unnecessary for the picture itself, I found that muting the volume made it somewhat easier to stomach.
What I found fascinating is watching the genesis of the makings of a movie. Keeping in mind that a film from 1925 doesn’t just lack the special effects of “Star Wars,” it lacks the basics of an audible motion picture (“Citizen Kane” must have felt like something from outer space to moviegoers and it came out just 15 years later).
Its fascinating in a ghoulish way to watch a movie that’s 91 years old – knowing that not one person involved on screen or behind the scenes is still alive today. I saw a pair of older men in one scene and mused to myself that if these fellows were in their mid 50s, it meant they were born in 1870. That’s younger than my great grandparents would have been. These people are literally from another lifetime.
The star of the film is legendary horror icon Lon Chaney who plays the titular phantom. We’ve all seen the infamous scene in which the apple of the phantoms eye Christine (Mary Philbin) removes the mask, and I have to admit,score and cinematography aside, the unveiled phantom makes for a perfectly heinous monster.
Another interesting tidbit is that Lon Chaney was set to reprise the role in the 1930 remake (with sound now available) but would succumb to throat cancer in August of that year at age 47. Another interesting concept (in a macabre sort of way) that blew me away; everyone knows Lon Chaney as a horror maestro and pioneer for the genre – and with his untimely death in 1930, he hasn’t made a movie for 86 years. That’s an icon that left his mark.
“The Phantom of the Opera” is billed as a horror movie but there is absolutely no way anyone watching today would see it that way. Moviegoers in 1925 were reported to have fled the theater or fainted dead away at the unmasking scene – you may just want to watch it for its place in history.
by – Matt Christopher
