Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Phantom of the Opera!

Theme: Five Cellars Below - Blitzkid

SPOYLORZ

"Is there a leak in here, or are you just glad to see me?" - actual dialogue.

Before it was a popular West End musical, The Phantom of the Opera was a novel of no small Frenchness. In between, however, it was chiefly known as Lon Chaney's most celebrated silentkino, which is still the best version of it of all. Like your humble blôggueriste, our titular protagonist just wants to be loved by the qt3.14 opera singer and can't understand why she can't look past my hideous countenance and rat-infested subterranean lair to see the sensitive young elderly millennial within, Lacey.

This is my go-to opener at speed dating.

While most horror literally-mes are low-functioning specials like Jason Voorhees and Leatherface, our Erik is a genius composer, much like me with my poasts, not to say engineer, whose labyrinthine cellars are bedecked with deathtraps of proto-James Bond villain scope and vision, which brilliantly serve to trip up our bumbling would-be Captains Save-A-Hoe but, alas, are not quite equal to preventing the enormous lynch mob that rampages through his tunnels at the end.

Just once I'd like to be in the mob instead of chased by it.

For the original ending followed the book in having Christine make out with /ourboi/, thus rendering him fakecel and redeeming him in the moral calculus of, I guess, those "reylo" fat chicks(?), IDK. Fortunately test audiences said "fuck that" (verbatim) so we got a much more realistic and satisfying ending in which the uggo patrol savagely beats him to death and dumps his mangled carcass in the Seine.

Average 1925 test audience member (colourised).

Naturally the great joy of this centenarian kinematographeme lies in its grandiose sets and gothic imagery. Setpieces of note include the chandelier attack and masked ball, but Chaney's makeup effects have garnered even greater notoriety, to the point where even if you are a blind homeless man in Papua New Guinea you will have seen his iconic Phantom face at some point, totally ruining the scene in which Christine just has to take off his mask because she can't decide whether she's horrified or wet af for him until she sees, which is hilarious, but at the time the hitherto-unspoilered reveal was said to send shockwaves of fainting anxiety throughout the 1920s audience. Of course, the same was said of later horror movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein and The Exorcist, so take it with a grain of salt, but I like to imagine /ourboi/ scared the hoes fr fr.

Remember: a wide berth is the same as aura.