The Phantom of the Opera: Lon Chaney and the Face Beneath
It was the autumn of 1925, and Universal had sent a print to every booth in America with strict instructions. Do not show the publicity stills. Do not let audiences see the Phantom's face before they sit down. The unmasking was the picture's entire commercial proposition — a moment audiences had to discover in the dark, in their seats, with no warning.
I projected it for the first time in late November of that year, in a packed house. The screams when the mask came off — and they were screams, women fainting, men gasping like they had taken a punch — were unlike anything I had heard in a cinema before or since. People had read the Gaston Leroux novel. They thought they knew what they were going to see.
They were wrong. That was Lon Chaney's gift. That was the picture.
The Man of a Thousand Faces
By 1925 Lon Chaney was already the most famous actor in Hollywood for a single reason: he could make himself look like anything. He had played The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 in a costume that included a fifty-pound rubber hump strapped to his back; he could not stand up straight in it for hours, and the pain was real. He had played gangsters with no legs (he bound his own legs back to his thighs), blind men, opium addicts, the Phantom.
His makeup kit was famous in the industry — a small case he carried himself, the contents of which he kept private. He designed his own faces. The studios learned not to interfere.
For the Phantom, Chaney constructed a face he understood was going to be the most extreme thing American audiences had ever seen on a screen. He pulled the tip of his nose upward with hidden wires to expose the nostrils. He stretched his mouth with prosthetic devices to widen it grotesquely. He painted black around his eyes to make the sockets look hollow. The final effect, which he refused to show anyone before the shoot, was something between a corpse and a skull — death wearing a tuxedo.
When his Phantom is finally unmasked, eighty-eight minutes into the film, you are not looking at makeup. You are looking at what the dead look like when they have decided they will not be forgotten.
The Paris Opera, Built in Hollywood
The Paris Opera House set Universal constructed for the film was so enormous and so structurally significant that it stood on the studio lot for the next sixty years. It was the first soundstage built with steel reinforcement — necessary to support the chandelier, the multi-level staircases, the underground catacombs that the production required.
The lake beneath the Opera, where the Phantom keeps his hidden lair, was built into the basement of Stage 28. Real water. Real depth. Erik rows Christine Daaé across it in a sequence that still feels eerier than anything in modern horror, partly because the water is genuinely there, partly because Chaney's performance makes you forget you are watching a film at all.
Stage 28 stood until 2014, when it was finally demolished. By then, dozens of horror films had used it. The Universal Monsters cycle of the 1930s — Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man — was filmed inside the Opera House the Phantom built. The Phantom never left.
The Compassion at the End
What people often forget about Leroux's novel and the Chaney film is the ending.
The Phantom does not die fighting. He does not die in flames. He does not even die at the hands of the mob that hunts him through the catacombs — although in the 1925 film, the mob is what closes in.
What he does is let Christine go.
She has discovered his face. She has seen what he is. She is in love with another man — Raoul, the young viscount who has always wanted her. The Phantom could keep her. He has built an entire underworld to make her his. And at the end, in one of the strangest decisions in early horror cinema, he steps aside.
Some versions of the film have him die in a chase scene. Others have him collapse alone at his organ. The novel ends with the most haunting line — that he died, and only the rats of the catacomb attended his end. Whatever the cut, the essential gesture is the same: he loves her, and he releases her, and the act of releasing her is the most human thing in the picture.
It is why this story keeps coming back. Every adaptation since — the Universal sequels, the Hammer remakes, the Lloyd Webber musical, the endless television versions — returns to that gesture. The horror is in the face. The reason the story endures is in the choice.
What Chaney Took With Him
Lon Chaney made one sound film — The Unholy Three in 1930 — and then died of throat cancer the same year. He was forty-seven. He had said in interviews that he did not want to make talkies. The horror he had built was a silent horror, designed for the gestural, the visual, the language of the face. He understood that his power lay in what audiences could see, not in what they could hear him say.
His son became Lon Chaney Jr. and would later play the Wolf Man for the Universal cycle in the 1940s — the cycle the Phantom's Paris Opera set had helped make possible. The line ran straight through.
If you want to understand the shadow work the Expressionists were doing in Germany at the same moment, Chaney's Phantom is the American answer. Less stylised. More physical. More dependent on a single performer's commitment to the bit. But the same impulse — to give cinema a face that could carry what words could not.
The Booth
The print I ran in 1925 was on cellulose nitrate, like everything else from that era — the same gorgeous, dangerous stock I have written about at length elsewhere when discussing what we have lost. The Phantom's negative is gone now. What survives are second-generation prints, some restored beautifully, some not.
But Chaney's face is still there. When you watch even a slightly faded print of the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, the unmasking scene still does what it did in November of that year, in a small cinema, to a packed house, to me at the projector, watching the audience react before I had quite finished feeding the next reel.
He let her go. That is the story. That is why the Phantom endures.
— The Projectionist