Who Is That Masked Man? The Phantom of the Opera, from Horror to Heartthrob

In 1925, newspapers printed anecdotal reports of women fainting in movie theater seats, unable to process the horror of the face revealed before them. Nearly a hundred years later, viewers squirmed in their seats for wholly different reasons, watching the very same figure and yearning that he would reveal himself to them, instead.

The figure? The Phantom of the Opera, portrayed dozens of times on stage, screen, and novel page. A tragic invention of journalist-turned-detective-fiction-writer Gaston Leroux, the Phantom has lived many lives, and while the basic plot elements remain largely the same, the context within which he exists--and our response to him--has performed a bizarre 180 that would have Leroux’s head spinning. Though he would not, to be sure, mind the compensation. 

Is the hideous figure of Lon Chaney recognizable in the suave, svelte form of Gerard Butler, or even in his monstrously popular stage incarnation in the musical written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the longest-running show on Broadway? Is the murderous living skeleton depicted in the novel the same character as the romantic figure who lures young and old alike into posting redemptionist, heart-wrenching fanfiction online? I would argue that, yes, of course he is: but that the transformations he’s undergone since 1911’s English translation of the novel are an echo of transformations in our own society, its anxieties, and the way we process those in our fantasies.

The monster-as-metaphor theme is a common one, seen in parables, fables, and fairy tales as well as modern horror and science fiction. The basic idea is that society takes issues that are, if not taboo, at least difficult to talk about and displaces them onto The Other; thus, Dracula stands in for fears of sex and immigrants from the east, and pod people stand in for either communism or consumerism depending on your political bent. In his origins, Erik the phantom recalled several different cultural anxieties for an early 20th century French audience: the foreigner, the sexual danger posed to women working outside the home, and a Frankenstein-like self-criticism of society’s tendency to dismiss those who are imperfect and, thus, risk their retribution.

But the thing about displacing anxieties onto the Other is that, first, cultural anxieties shift over time, and second, these metaphors are never so explicit that they represent a one to one relationship. We’ve seen this in many of our literary and cinematic horrors over the years; to go back to Dracula, are we afraid of death and dying and blood? Are we afraid of sexual predators entering our boudoirs? Or, are we afraid of the desire we have for that same being? The answer is, most likely: “yes.”

 

In the original tale, Erik is hideously ugly in a way that is unexplained but specific: he essentially looks like a corpse, with sunken eyes, no nose, yellow skin stretched over bone and a lanky frame that “smells of death.” We learn that he was born this way, rejected by his parents and thus sentenced to a life on the fringes despite his great gifts in music, architecture, and, as it turns out, murder. Finally retreating to a solo existence under the Paris Opera House, extorting the management for his needs by allowing tales of an “Opera Ghost” to proliferate, Erik is seemingly content until he hears a young soprano by the name of Christine Daae. Christine, kept sheltered by her now-deceased violinist father and fed on tales of an Angel of Music, readily takes both to Erik’s tutelage and his story that he is the Angel sent by her father. Of course, her childhood sweetheart Raoul shows up and wants to take her away. Before that can happen, Erik kidnaps Christine, reveals himself to her, and in the end forces her into a choice: marry Erik, or Raoul dies. She not only chooses to save Raoul, but takes pity on Erik, crying with him and kissing his forehead in an act of benevolence he has never before experienced and, afterward, cannot shake. He lets the lovers go, dying broken-hearted. The novel begs us not exactly to excuse or forgive the Phantom, but to understand that he had been driven mad by society’s mistreatment. He’s hardly a heroic figure, but neither is this the sort of one-dimensional gothic villain he might have been in other hands.

Lon Chaney

In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that Hollywood would get to this tale. It was far more popular in America than in France, and Lon Chaney, the Man of 1,000 Faces, had recently assayed another sad French “monster,” Quasimodo from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Chaney’s Erik is, however, a bit less sympathetic than the book’s; he does not let Christine go, but rather is in turn a victim of an angry mob seeking retribution for his murders. While circumstances like the return of injured veterans from the first world war and the actually sensitive portrayal by Lon Chaney might make audiences empathize, the studio did not want his villainy to be ambiguous or to make the audience work too hard, and, thus, robbed the story of its redemptive element.

Claude Rains and Susanna Foster

In a strange attempt to reintroduce sympathy, Universal’s next attempt in 1943 with Claude Rains as the Phantom changes the story quite a bit. They wanted to focus on the lush opera setting, not the horror, so they toned down the facial scarring and had Erique (no Germanic tinge here! Not during WWII!) injured while mistakenly believing his music was being stolen. He hides under the opera, but secretly mentors Christine, who in this version may or may not be his daughter. The script is so unclear on this point his motives are really difficult to pin down, and Erique becomes both oddly unthreatening and less rational in his revenge fantasies, given that his story is mostly that of a frustrated artist who can’t get a break, not a social outcast who has been tortured for his entire life. That said, the addition of “frustrated artist” is important here, as it gives another angle for the Phantom story to manipulate: that of individual effort and creation vs corporate control.

Paul Williams and William Finley in Phantom of the Paradise

This element gets heightened over the next few versions: there’s a 1962 Hammer Horror film with Herbert Lom, where the Phantom is not only entirely the victim but not even the main bad guy. The Opera’s owner is the real villain, stealing the Phantom’s music to put his name on and threatening Christine. In Brian de Palma’s 1974 Phantom of the Paradise the redemption/romance plotline is almost completely eschewed in favor of a revenge tragedy in which the hapless indie musician is repeatedly used and abused by a powerful mogul (cast in the mold of Faust by way of Dorian Gray) until he sacrifices himself to stop him. Even then, the music plays on and the crowd simply sees it as part of the show. When you think about the context of the 60s and 70s, and the questions of social upheaval and corporate authority, you can see that these ideas fit within the zeitgeist of their respective moments despite the departure from the original stories. There was plenty of horror going on in the world without making the musician a monster, after all.

Ali Ewoldt and Ben Crawford

Up until now, Phantom has elements of horror and romance, with some half-baked social commentary thrown in. But it’s in 1986 that things really heat up--when the Phantom hits Broadway. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical retooled the original tale--with some elements from the adaptations--into a lush pop pseudo-opera that is all about feeling. Because it leaves out a lot of plot and character elements, focusing instead on emotional storytelling, the arc is entirely about how Christine and the Phantom, and to a lesser extent Raoul, feel about each other. The redemptive element fully back in play, what went on to become arguably the most popular musical of all time grabbed audiences in part because it told such a simple, relatable story: boy meets girl, girl likes other boy, boy kidnaps girl, but girl has enough love in her heart to touch boy’s soul and give him the peace he needs to do the right thing. While his ugliness is not in doubt, the fact we get his own side told in lushly orchestrated tones makes it almost inevitable that we will feel differently about this man than, say, the towering figure of Lon Chaney. The musical itself is on his side, unambiguously romantic even though Christine does eventually leave with Raoul. Even the kiss from the end of the novel has been transformed from a Pietà-like vignette to a passionate lip lock.

So what does this mean, to the overall thrust of the tale and its cultural significance? 

Well, for one thing, like many other formerly verboten figures like Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Erik is now an acceptable “fantasy” object of desire. This is not to say monsters were never considered sexually attractive prior to the late 1980s, but it was certainly an outlier when it came to how they were portrayed or how (publicly) people expressed their opinions. With the proliferation of monster boyfriends in media, it’s out in the open that one might desire the mysterious and tragic figure as opposed to the “boy next door.” Again, this “bad boy” trope goes back much further than this particular story, but there has been a shift in our media and the conversation around it. I think this can be explained by two complementary thrusts in society: the increasing notion through psychology and social justice that Othering is dehumanizing, and the various sexual revolutions which have created a more varied space for human desire to manifest itself, at least publicly. 

While one-dimensional, demonic villains still persist in our narratives, there’s been an increasing desire to understand or even relate to these figures. Or, to put it another way, an increasing willingness to admit that when we Otherize certain issues, we are really talking about ourselves. As more research went into the origins of human behavior and emotion, dismissing certain types of villainy as “inhuman” became increasingly more complicated. On the other hand, the voices of those who related not to the dashing young hero but the benighted “monster” became more audible. I’m vastly oversimplifying here, of course, but there’s a very large difference between Leroux’s exhortation at the end of the novel that we must needs pity the Opera Ghost and an admittance by many fans that their viewpoint character is the Opera Ghost. And where at one point subterranean desires were exactly that, it is now far more socially acceptable to watch Michael Crawford croon his way through “Music of the Night” and say, “I’ll take that one, please.” If the Phantom is, after all, just a man, then he is both relatable and accessible. 

I would argue that the Lloyd Webber musical (and its fandom) elevated the Phantom to far more than that, until he is actually the equivalent of the handsome hunk on a romance novel cover. There’s no little resonance there to the notion of the “bodice ripper,” the idea that it would be nice if someone just came along and took care of all those niggling, nasty desires for you--in fantasy land, of course. But along with Lloyd Webber’s erotic angel of the night came some interesting responses, both intensifying the effect--and providing backlash.

Robert Englund

After the musical’s premiere, there were a spate of horror movies of varying quality which used the Phantom as a grotesque figure as if to put paid to the idea he was a fluffy romance hero with a fashionably goth veneer. Dwight Little and Dario Argento both made horror versions in the 80s and 90s, starring Robert Englund and Julian Sands respectively. Interestingly, while both portray the Phantom as wantonly murderous (and, in the latter case, prone to sexual assault), they include doses of overt sexuality missing from earlier versions. Once those floodgates had been opened, it seemed, Erik was fair game for all fantasies. He no longer stood simply for misunderstood musician or hounded victim-turned-villain, but for all sorts of dark desires you might play out with an R rating. You also had obvious cash-grabs like Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge which recasts Eric as a young weightlifter whose house gets demolished to make way for a shopping mall, which I suppose was meant to appeal to the direct-to-video youth market.

Teri Polo and Charles Dance

But alongside this “no, he’s actually super gross” backlash, the romantic tide continued to rise. The early 90s gave us the musical and miniseries written by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston, starring Charles Dance in the movie as the swooniest, most likeable Erik yet. A man rejected by family, longing only for acceptance, who kills people mostly by accident and is actually pretty charitable to his Christine in the sense that he does not lie and essentially does whatever she asks him to. Throughout all of this, fandom plugged away in zines and online, mostly in the vein of the Lloyd Webber musical, weaving its own revisionist fantasies about an eventual Erik and Christine endgame. The narrative had shifted entirely away from weird mystery about a shadowy figure under the opera who kidnaps naive ingenues and towards a “take me, please, you misunderstood genius” mode.

Gerard Butler

To this point in history, this mode has seen its apogee in the 2004 film of the musical, directed by Joel Schumacher and produced and funded by Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. Wildly divisive within fandom (if not in the actual world), this movie waters down the Phantom’s villainy even more, while amping up his attractiveness to the point where it remains unexplained why he’s even hiding away. Gerard Butler’s muscular form and gruff, rock-singer style woo a teenage Emmy Rossum with very little hint of menace or outrage as far as the movie’s concerned. The whole thing plays out like a girl torn between two older lovers: the rich but bland “good boy” Raoul and the sexy but troubled “bad boy” Phantom. (Erik doesn’t even get a name in the musical version, that’s how much he’s actually reduced to an object of desire.) To this day, and I’m only simplifying a tiny bit, forums devoted to The Phantom of the Opera teem with arguments about how the movie is good because Gerard Butler is so sexy. Countless posts and fanfiction attest to the idea that viewers not only want Christine to stay, but think it is only good and right that she do so, and offer themselves in her place.

As I’ve noted before, the trajectory of tragic ‘monster’ to ‘misunderstood romantic hero’ is not isolated to Phantom, and I’m not convinced it’s entirely a bad thing. In some sense, it feels like a step in a more enlightened direction, at least as far as attempting to understand what is different and applying human qualities to actual humans is concerned. That we can uncover some of our repressed longings and admit to shared fantasies means that we can begin to parse out what in those longings is actually healthy and what is probably best left to our solo moments. At the same time, in the Gerard Butler incarnation Erik’s problematic elements have been washed away to the point where he is only a misunderstood hero; and, conversely, his remaining problematic choices (stalking, kidnapping, ultimatum-seeking) are still treated as romantic.

It is unclear where the next iteration will take us. I actually prefer the perversely more nuanced if melodramatic Erik of the Leroux novel, but it’s plain that multiple generations (including mine) have now been trained to see this figure as fantasy fodder. In the wake of greater social justice movements, it will be interesting to see if the old-fashioned notions of male attraction survive, or if Erik will go back to being some form of ‘monster,’ simply recast in a mold familiar to those who see this behavior as reeking of patriarchal entitlement. What I do know is that every generation seems to get the Phantom it needs, and that we will always require figures on which to project our fears--and desires.