#Dario Argento's Phantom of the Opera

[dangerousconnoisseurdonut]

Actor Missing

I just learned that actor Julian Sands has gone missing on Mount Baldy where he had gone hiking. For those unaware, Julian Sands has had numerous roles, including Dario Argento’s Phantom of the Opera, an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Rose Red, the first two Warlock movies, an episode of Agatha Christie’s Ms. Marple that also featured Tom Baker, and, to all Gotham fans, he was Gerald Crane, Jonathan Crane’s father who injected him with the fear juice.

He was an experienced mountain hiker and they recently got a ping off his cellphone from one of the towers so they are hopeful he will be found alive and well. I am sure all Gotham fans, as well as general Sands fans, are all hopeful that he will be found safely.

[madreemeritus]

[esqueletosgays]

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA / IL FANTASMA DELL'OPERA (1998)

Director: Dario Argento Cinematography: Ronnie Taylor

[anhed-nia]

So I'm in the middle of this research project centered on Dario Argento's OPERA, for which I have required myself to watch as many screen adaptations of the Gaston Leroux novel The Phantom of the Opera as I can take. What I have determined so far is that the Phantom of the Opera is a story everyone wants to tell, but not very many people are sure of how to tell it. In fact, it's not that easy to say what it is about archetypally. You know, Wolfman stories are typically about "the beast in man" (with femininity positioned as some sort of cure for this personality split), Frankenstein stories are usually about human nature (i.e. an uncanny creature can have more humanity than vain and bigoted humans), Dracula-type vampire stories are most generally about the problems of being an outsider (queer, foreign, etc). But Phantom of the Opera is like...well, everyone likes the love story part of it, which is more or less modeled on Dracula, with a woman torn between seductive darkness and the safety of square society. But then there are all these other parts that seem to flummox people in the retelling.

I haven't read the Leroux novel YET but the first round of movies have been interesting, and also sort of perplexing. The iteration from 1925 holds up, largely due to Chaney's creation of the Phantom which remains a top tier monster. People don't often talk about the mask though! Which looks like a cross between Peter Lorre and the Devo Boogie Boy, it's disturbing and I like it.

This Phantom was born in the dungeons during a revolutionary bloodbath and is disfigured from birth, drawing on the antique idea that a mother's trauma is translated in the deformity of her children; also, compellingly, these dungeons lie fathoms beneath the opera house where the bourgeoisie are witlessly dancing on the graves of martyrs and criminals embodied in the Phantom. The ingenue Christine is an interesting figure who breaks up with her boyfriend at the beginning because she wants to give her whole self to her career; when the Phantom starts murmuring to her through the walls it's as if the spirit of opera itself has chosen her to be its avatar, which she seems to find totally rational. It's sort of cool, what other movie of this era has a likeable heroine choosing her potential for greatness over love? This is the element of the story that is the most interesting, but I'll expand on that in a minute.

The Chaney edition benefits a lot from keeping things simple. The 1943 version with Claude Raines has a little bit too much going on and the story doesn't get a lot of time to congeal between so many long opera sequences; this movie really takes the opera part of the title seriously! Actually they're the best thing about it, mostly because of Nelson Eddy who is extremely beautiful and a real opera singer, and who projects this blazing desire for Susanna Foster that is incredibly convincing. Like I'd normally say they have great chemistry, but I think it's just a lot of power radiating from him specifically.

Ahem.

Uh anyway. This movie picks up the reoccurring (but not universal) idea that the Phantom is a genteel and sophisticated composer who has just fallen on hard times, who goes mad when his latest concerto is stolen. He is disfigured while struggling with the plagiarist and installs himself under the opera house where he can haunt his former protege Christine, who is already torn between dreamy Nelson Eddy and her stuffy cop boyfriend. One of my favorite things here is that even though this film is extremely quaint and old fashioned, everybody hates cops; this Christine is less a self-determined careerist than someone who is under pressure from her artist friends who find it profoundly repulsive that she is dating a policeman. Meanwhile the Phantom is just way too gentle and sappy, which is extra disappointing because Claude Rains's Invisible Man is so fabulously chaotic and sadistic, it made me really aware of the Phantom that could have been. This one doesn't properly represent the high society vs. underworld dichotomy that Christine should be torn between. So what is this movie about? There's so many guys in it and a few different themes flapping in the breeze. Is it about love? Is it about self-actualizing through art? Is it about the cutthroat world of showbusiness? It doesn't have that much to say, ultimately, and it just seems really unmotivated. Also I don't like this mask, sue me.

The Hammer edition is even more disappointing, considering the studio's previous successes with Universal Monster remakes. Here Christine is torn between a suave opera producer, the lecherous composer who has plagiarized the Phantom, and yeah the Phantom. Too many guys, it confuses whatever the dynamic and themes are supposed to be. Michael Gough as the plagiarist is so much more evil and threatening than poor Herbert Lom's Phantom that it's hard to stay focused on the main point here. Curiously the Hammer version is rather unromantic, with the Phantom just slapping Christine around until she sings his tunes right; that is kind of refreshing in a way, although it also means that the film lacks tension, which contributes to its being surprisingly anticlimactic. The best guy in the movie is actually Thorley Walters whose character serves almost no narrative purpose at all, he just hulks around with this WTF? look on his face and it is kind of adorable. I guess I like the gross mask in this one, too.

But the Hammer version has one interesting strength, which is that Christine is singing the lead in a new opera about Joan of Arc. Just like Joan, Christine hears a disembodied voice prophesizing her ascent to power. The best thing about the Phantom lore is the idea that the woman has this latent power that can either be activated by the Phantom, or suppressed by her square boyfriend (the relationship being mutually exclusive with opera stardom in many iterations). She isn't just a love object to be possessed, she herself possesses of some kind of devastating energy that needs to be awakened and channeled--or contained and forgotten, if she decides to get married and stay home or something. This is pretty cool, and it is interestingly realized in Dario Argento's OPERA, in which (spoiler alert I guess) a killer stalks an opera singer with the aim of catalyzing her own latent psychopathy. This idea is at the center of my thesis and I'm looking forward to fleshing it out, although I'm kind of dreading all the other PHANTOMs that I have committed myself to watching. I really don't want to deal with Andrew LLoyd Webber at all, but after I get through at least the Joel Schumacher one of the those I'm going to reward myself with a rewatch of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE which I'm going to guess right now is the best retelling of this story after the Chaney one. I'm counting on Paul Williams' music to be catchier than Webber's.

I'm whining about my own decisions, I know, but really the main hardship of this project is that now I keep getting the Vandals' punk theme song from PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC'S REVENGE stuck in my head, and let me tell you that is very unwelcome. Here it is, if you've decided you're done being happy and sane:

[giallofever2]

ORIGINAL PICS on Set ‼️

Il Fantasma dell’opera

Suspiria

Due Occhi Diabolici

[maskedhatter]

......... Sorry, but this must be done

[borom1r]

I can only find the watermarked version of this pic but please I’m so obsessed w the vibes here

[chunkecheeks]

I’m convinced that phantom is a horror story actually <- bearer of the curse

YEAH I MEAN. IT IS IT VERY MUCH IS. BEFORE THE MUSICAL IT WAS BRANDED AS A HORROR SO MUCH SO THAT THE PHANTOM IS LITERALLY IN THE UNIVERSAL MONSTERS LINE

[esmiephan]

found this little dead boy last night, near to my car.

Is it Ratatouille's Remy? Is it Copia's future? Is it Dario Argento's psycho shit? We will never know.

[maryvivianpearce]

Fave new to me films of October ‘22 part 2 🧡

[oneofusnet]

Digital Noise Episode 305: Phantom of the Untouchable Greasy Batman DIGITAL NOISE EPISODE 305: PHANTOM OF THE UNTOUCHABLE GREASY BATMAN Chris is joined again by Sir Doctor Wright Sulek for some more home release review shenanigans. The dastardly duo looks at a sexy Jekyll and Hyde with Norman Bates, the first TV movie by the guy who brought the world Fright Night and Chucky, a… Read More »Digital Noise Episode 305: Phantom of the Untouchable Greasy Batman read more on One of Us

[plaguery]

phantom of the opera (1998, dir. dario argento) liveblog

okay starting off he is just a long haired blond guy. no mask. what makes him a phantom is that he was abandoned as a baby and his baby basket drifted into the sewer where rats took him in and raised him. the rats have red glowing eyes

[madreemeritus]

A new The Phantom of the Opera adaptation is coming soon, however i'm not excited about it. I'm worried, to be fair.

I don't see any problem in PotO as an erotic story, but the problem is that this upcoming version seems like a creepy misconception of "Dark Romance". It reminds me Dario Argento's horrible rat phantom and it's... not good. It's a French prodution, by the way, but it's going to be filmed in English because it belongs to Universal.

You can read the whole article here.

It relates to 2021-2022 news that you can read here.

[ancientphantom]

Y’all, Amazon is out of control. Please enjoy this edition of Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, by F. Scott Fitzgerald and featuring the blurb from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby along with choosing to use the poster from the bonkers 1998 Italian horror-movie adaptation Phantom of the Opera by Dario Argento as the cover.

I had to see it, so now you all do, too.

[forthegothicheroine]

Opera isn't a perfect movie- there are lots of points in the plot that rely on people behaving bizarrely or just not doing anything- but from the inciting events to what happens to the villain's face, it's an incredible riff on Phantom of the Opera. It's been said by others, but if this was the movie that was named Dario Argento's Phantom of the Opera, I don't think people would have argued with that.

[ask-papa-terzo]

Since you need to be off your feet as much as possible, I would like to offer up my DVD collection. Netflix ain't got nothin' on me, darling. I have a collection that would beat up Netflix in a back alley and go through its pockets for loose TV episodes.

And for someone who doesn't speak a word of Italian, I have a LOT of Italian-language movies. Granted a fair chunk of them are Dario Argento films. (I still haven't forgiven him for what he did to Phantom of the Opera, but the rest is good.)

And, too absolutely no one's surprise I have multiple versions of all of the Star Wars movies. Ever hear Darth Vader in Italian? Terrifying. (Not as terrifying as Darth Vader in German, but nothing is as terrifying as being yelled at in German.) And, because I need to retain my nerd card; I also have all of the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Doctor Who.

There's also an absurd amount of pro-shot European musicals. Tanz der Vampires, Notre Dame de Paris, Elisabeth, Les Miserables (the original French production).

What would you like to watch? I probably have it. No need to play the "which streaming service has such-and-such?" game!

(PS - I call pretty much everyone "darling". Between the kids and the pets, I got confused and never got the right name on the first try; so I just call everyone "darling". Saves me from getting into trouble.)

Ahh... This is a lot, Sibling. Grazie. Maybe we can watch through the movies together? You can have the English subtitles on while we watch in Italian, maybe you will pick up on a phrase or two.