The novel is soaked in late-Victorian decadence, its preoccupation with the heroine’s purity in the face of her obsessed stalker-kidnapper a transparent veil for titillation. Inspired by a tour of the extensive cellars beneath the Paris Opera, Leroux spun a fantastical tale of a disfigured musical genius living in the bowels of the Opera who stalks a young singer. Leroux invented the Phantom in 1909 shortly after he retired from journalism to write potboilers like the 1907 locked-room mystery The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Riley’s book on the film, picked by Chaney after Laemmle’s planned adaptation of The Man Who Laughs fell through. Gaston Leroux’s Phantom was a last-minute, second choice, according to Philip J. No one cared what the as-yet-unnamed picture was Chaney meant profits. When studio chief Carl Laemmle announced at a sales convention that he’d booked Chaney again, his audience gave him a standing ovation. In 1924 the Phantom was just a means for Universal to get one more picture out of money-maker Lon Chaney, who had been a box-office smash in The Hunchback of Notre Dame the previous year. He anticipates both superheroes and psychotics, with future shock purveyors like Hitchcock and William Castle endlessly reworking his monstrous reveal, the moment of unmasking, that makes the unwary jump. The roots of the Phantom movie lie in Gothic fairy tales like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Bluebeard,” in films such as the 1913 Fantômas serial, and even in the disfigured veterans of World War I. He is the unholy spawn of three mismatched parents: a French writer who claimed his fiction was fact-based, a brilliant actor whose career was built playing villains and outcasts, and a studio head who-like a torch-wielding villager-feared and almost destroyed the monster he never understood. Before Dracula, before Frankenstein, before the Universal Pictures Corporation understood there was money to be made scaring the bejesus out of its audience, there was the Phantom.

1925 phantom of the opera costume