The Phantom (Gerard Butler) and Christine Daae (Emmy Rossum) Prior to 1986, when the musical phenomenon began, The Phantom of the Opera was a character that lived in the pantheon of Universal Famous Monsters where the original role was celebrated for Lon Chaney’s performance and its triumph of grotesque makeup after the musical, the story was claimed by the same middle-aged crowds that regard My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965) as the pinnacles of cinematic art, or by lovers of melancholy romantic fantasy along the lines of tv’s Beauty and the Beast (1987-90). The Phantom of the Opera musical is a case of a phenomenon having changed and shaped a public perception of a story in an entirely different way to the one it was originally intended.
To respond to such questions, one puts their all-important air of being a deacon of obscure trivia on and says “Well, actually there have been no less than seven different films made out of The Phantom of the Opera before the musical came out.” This usually produces a look of amazement and one can then go for the coup de grace and tell the person how, rather than the florid romance that it has been made into by the musical, that these other films tell The Phantom of the Opera as a horror story, while the original book that all of these are based on was intended as a Gothic thriller. As an historian of horror film, I have had several similar occasions where people have come up to me and made the comment: “Gee, I didn’t know there had been a film made of The Phantom of the Opera before the musical came out.” I cite this because it shows two things – firstly, just how prevalent the musical Phantom of the Opera phenomenon has become and, secondly, how it has altered people’s perceptions as to what the original story was about. I have heard in mention several times the apocryphal story of someone who was standing in a record store during the mid-1970s and overheard two teenage girls say in amazement “Gee, I didn’t know Paul McCartney was in another band before Wings.” There are probably various other variations on such a story, all of which are used to cite as examples of how today’s youth live in ignorance of what has gone before them.
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