This haunting presence belongs to the Phantom, a psychotic and isolated former composer who immediately falls in love with Christine Daae, the understudy for diva Carlotta, once he sees her on stage. The audience quickly learns that someone – or something – is haunting the Opera House. The film lures its audience to peer behind the glamour and richness of the Paris Opera House stage, and therefore primarily works by juxtaposing its pretty on-stage scenes with the horrifying world that exists backstage. Rupert Julian’s silent masterpiece The Phantom of the Opera features a particularly dark and grisly adaptation of Leroux’s original novel. The two films center around the horrors that stalk the darkened corridors and underbelly of the Paris Opera House, but while the 1925 film is bleak and ominous, the 1943 Phantom is largely full of color and excess. The films tell the same basic story of a masked composer haunting the Paris Opera House through the use of different aesthetics. Two of the earliest filmic adaptations of Phantom were produced by Universal Studios: the 1925 silent movie starring Lon Chaney, and the 1943 technicolor film starring Claude Rains. As a former theatre kid, I’m pretty much trained to drool over everything that Phantom adaptations stand for – the over-the-top characters, romantic music, elaborate set pieces, rising starlets, gaudy capes and, of course, the masquerades. Perhaps this attachment to the theatre is what makes me love the Phantom so much. He is simultaneously abandoned by and forever trapped within show business. Whether the story is set in an opera house, a rock show, or a high school auditorium, the phantom’s narrative is inherently theatrical. Without fail, its titular villain is both monstrous in his lascivious and controlling desires, as well as tragic in his deep isolation.

With its lavish sets and masked characters, adaptations of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera, or Le Fantôme de l’Opéra in its original French, all share a similar sense of the dramatic.

Phantom of the opera 2004 unmasked