The Phantom with mask on the cover of a 1920 French edition of the novel
and sans mask in the 1925 Hollywood film starring Lon Chaney
and sans mask in the 1925 Hollywood film starring Lon Chaney
The Phantom of the Opera, written by Gaston Leroux and first published as a single volume in 1910, was partly inspired - so it's said - by real events at the Paris Opera.
It's essentially the tale of a queer love affair between a young Swedish soprano, Christine Daaé, and the masked Phantom whom she mistakenly believes to be the angel of music sent by her dead father to help nurture her talent. Things take a sinister and violent turn for the worse after the Phantom fails to secure Christine the lead role of Marguerite in a new production of Faust and extracts revenge upon the theatre managers by dropping a crystal chandelier onto the heads of several unfortunate members of the audience seated below.
The Phantom, whom we learn is called Erik, then forcibly abducts Christine from her dressing room and keeps her imprisoned in his creepy subterranean hideaway built beneath the opera house. Here, to her horror and his great embarrassment and shame, she unmasks him and exposes his grotesquely disfigured face.
In the classic 1925 film adaptation of the book, dir. Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney in the title role and Mary Philbin as Christine, this is a particularly lurid and sensational scene for which Chaney famously devised his own ghoulish make-up; darkening his eye-sockets, for example, to suggest a skull-like appearance.
Chaney also pinned back the tip of his nose and enlarged the nostrils with black paint to further this cadaverous impression. Jagged false teeth and a combover completed the look, as described by Leroux in his novel. Audiences were said to have screamed and fainted in terror when they first caught sight, like Christine, of the Phantom's face.
Crucially, it should be noted that this silent Phantom's facial disfigurements are congenital in origin and not the result of an acid attack, as suggested in later films that attempt to solicit a greater degree of sympathy for Erik and transform him into a more tragic and romantic figure; i.e., to break the link between criminality and ugliness, challenging the long held belief taken as a moral fact amongst the ancient Greeks that those who were monstrum in fronte were also - without question - monstrum in animo ...
