










































“Man’s Hatred Has Made Me So”: 
Freakification and the Shifting 
Gaze in The Phantom of the Opera 
(1925)

As the conventional freak 
shows reached their peak in 

the 1920s and began their steady 
descent, another art form came to 
take their place, complete with the 
potential to freakify its subjects in 
more complex, subtle ways. Film 
had begun with the minute-long 
footage of The Horse in Motion 
in 1878 (which was intended to 
answer a scientific inquiry, not to 
entertain), but it had since advanced to full-length movies, albeit without 
dialog until 1927’s groundbreaking The Jazz Singer. Although sitting in a 
1920s theatre and watching a black-and-white silent film at first glance 
seems a far cry from the experience of going to a freak show, the similarities 
become apparent in the genre of horror. Like the freak show, the horror 
film delves into the liminal spaces between man and beast, often exploiting 
patrons’ desire to look on the physical differences of others, a desire 
motivated by the hunger for novel entertainments, as well as the need to 
establish the boundaries of cultural otherness and affirm one’s own position 
within the majority. 
 According to Stephen Prince, horror delves deeper than other genres 
into the “fundamental questions about the nature of human existence.” It 
interrogates “nonhuman categories” via “the violation of the ontological 
categories on which being and culture reside.” This creates an “us” versus 
“them” dichotomy. Horror films also generate a paradox in exploring “the 

  -  Kathryn Hampsire, Ball State University

Abstract
By using artistic conventions only available 
through cinema, The Phantom of the Opera (1925) 
manipulates the gaze to create a character so 
inhuman and unsympathetic, he transcends the 
position of the freak into the realm of the monster. 
The silent horror version of this film extends the 
social construct of the freak into cinema so that, 
while the freak shows may have been closing their 
doors, the legacy of the freak lived on.

Digital Literature Review, vol. 3 (2016). © Ball State University. All Rights Reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce critical edition to dlr@bsu.edu.

119



way that terror opens onto pleasure” (Prince 2, 3, 10). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen 
adds that the horror film is a safe space in which to make these explorations: 
“We watch the monstrous spectacle of the horror film because we know 
that the cinema is a temporary place, that the jolting sensuousness of the 
celluloid images will be followed by reentry into the world of comfort and 
light” (Cohen 17). 
 In many ways, the freak show performs these same functions. 
According to Rosemarie Garland Thomson in her book Extraordinary 
Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, “Freak 
shows framed and choreographed bodily differences that we now call 
‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘disability’ in a ritual that enacted the social process 
of making cultural otherness from the raw materials of human physical 
variation” (60). This made a silent horror film the perfect bridge between 
the old genre for freakification and the new. Indeed, Ian Conrich points out 
that freak shows and horror films alike explore “the boundary separating 
beast and mankind [that] is often challenged” by the monstrous portrayals 
characteristic of these movies (47).
 Although many versions of the Phantom of the Opera’s story make 
use of the freak show trope (some even more explicitly than this one), the 
1925 production in particular occupies an interesting place in American 
cinematic history as one of the age’s “horror spectaculars” (Conrich 40); 
it also capitalizes on the shift of the freak show from the sideshow to the 
big screen during the age of silent film. In this production, the Paris Opera 
House is home of beautiful singers like Christine, the protagonist, and 
also to a much darker figure—the Phantom of the Opera, whose spectral 
presence has birthed a multitude of rumors and superstitions among the 
owners and patrons alike. Previously known as Erik, the Phantom is not 
truly a monster, but an escaped convict with severe facial disfigurements 
who lives beneath the opera house in what was once torture chambers. He 
has been giving Christine voice lessons for years and has become obsessed 
with the young singer, although they have never met face-to-face. His 
fixation on her reaches a crisis when another suitor, Raoul, plans to marry 
Christine; this leads the Phantom to finally reveal himself to her, albeit 
hiding his face behind a mask, and he proceeds to wreak havoc in her life 
and those of everyone else involved with the opera house. The film climaxes 
when the Phantom kidnaps Christine, Raoul rescues her, and an angry mob 

Hampshire

120



chases the Phantom into the river.
 The film serves as an extension of the dying freak show, performing 
an important move of shifting the process of freakification from live 
performance to the world of cinematic entertainment, “with a cinematic 
experience of images of the aberrant and the bizarre replacing the 
immediacy of the genuine (and often fabricated, or ‘gaffed’) disabilities 
of the live carnival” (Conrich 47). The Phantom of the Opera even features a 
character, Buquet, who is similar to a freak show’s master of ceremonies, 
complete with “his visceral descriptions and melodramatic manner” 
(Randell 77). Thus, by examining this film in particular, one can see the 
important ways that traditional freak show practices are enhanced and 
complicated by their new home on screen. By using artistic conventions 
only available through the cinematic medium, Phantom manipulates the 
gaze of the characters and the audience members to create a character so 
inhuman and unsympathetic that he transcends the position of the freak 
into the realm of the monster. 

GAZING AND POINTING AT FREAKS
 As the freak show transitioned onto the horror film screen, the 
silent film enhanced elements of its predecessor that were essential in 
the process of freakification; in particular, the silent film emphasizes the 
visual conventions upon which human exhibits relied, such as staring. In 
“‘The Phantom of the Opera’: The Lost Voice of Opera in Silent Film,” Michal 
Grover-Friedlander points out the way that silent movies and operatic 
performances both place emphasis on “an extravagance of gesture and 
movement” (180). This emphasis on gestures is particular to Phantom’s place 
in cinematic history. Norman King noted that there was a “marked” shift of 
“acting style away from the exaggeratedly gestural toward the naturalistic” 
in silent films that added sound beyond instrumental accompaniment 
(39). Because this film was made prior to this shift, it still carries all of the 
exaggerated gestures characteristic of both silent film and the opera. The 
Phantom uses such gestures to redistribute the gaze from himself as a 
physically disabled man onto the female object of his desire.
 Throughout my analysis of the film, I noticed that most of the 
extravagant gestures originated from the object of freakification, the 
Phantom. The most prominent and frequent of such gesticulations is that 

Hampshire

121



of pointing. While the objectifying gaze—the act of staring—has received 
much discussion within critical conversations about freakification and 
disability studies (see Thomson’s book, Staring), this film demonstrates the 
importance of the physical gestures that accompany it. The act of pointing 
is a more extreme form of freakification than the gaze because it takes 
staring one step further by adding a direct physical action that is apparent to 
potential onlookers. This increases the attention drawn to the object of the 
gaze. Several times, the Phantom points dramatically at Christine in a way 
that emphasizes his reversal of the gaze onto her. 
 Although Erik is treated as a “freak” because of his physical disabilities, 
very rarely do other characters point at him, while he points at Christine no 
less than nine times. The two observed moments where Erik himself is the 
object of pointing occur early in the film, and, in one of them, he points to 
himself before the intertitle screen (the printed text screens that interrupt 
filmed action in silent movies to provide dialogue and narration) conveys 
his words: “Men once knew me as Erik, but for many years I have lived 
in these cellars, a nameless legend” (43:00). The other is when Christine 
accuses him of being the infamous Phantom (42:23). Other than these two 
early instances, the rest of the moments in the film that include pointing 
occur either when he points at Christine or, in the two instances, when he 
gestures toward an angry mob (1:40:30, 1:40:44). The sheer number of times 
this happens over the course of a film just under two hours and the fact that 
the pointing almost always serves to emphasize an implicit relationship 
between the Phantom and Christine demonstrate the importance of this 
extended form of the gaze to the film.
 Often, the Phantom uses these gestures to create a sense of accusation 
or anger toward Christine. Other times, this motion serves to draw attention 
away from himself: after Christine sneaks up behind him and removes 
his mask, he points at her in a dramatic moment when her fear—both of 
his newly-revealed face and his ominous advances—is evident (50:27). 
Additionally, when his gesture refers to the angry mob of people who are 
hunting him down, Erik is striving to deflect their gaze from himself by 
redirecting it back onto them.
 Besides the way that pointing functions within the film, it is also 
important to consider what this gesture serves for the story as a film, a 
visual art with viewers. When a character points to something or someone 

Hampshire

122



else on screen, this motion draws the eye to the object of the gesture. Since 
this action is nearly always observed coming from the Phantom himself, 
this demonstrates a way that the character is drawing attention away 
from himself, whenever he is being freakified. He takes the gaze that is 
implicitly on him due to his position as a freak and twists it by deflecting the 
audience’s gaze onto someone else, inviting the audience to look with him, 
instead of at him. 
 Within the context of a freak show, it would have been common to see 
patrons pointing at the human exhibits; this invites the others witnessing 
the myriad of human oddities to join that individual in gazing at one 
specimen in particular. This invitation to gaze with someone else is inverted 
in Phantom the same way that it would have been if one of the exhibits at 
a freak show had been pointing back at the patrons; this would have given 
the audience pause as they attempt to navigate the fact that their visual 
attention is being drawn away from the freak and toward a member of the 
normate population, someone who looks like them. 
 The act of pointing to one of the patrons at a freak show could 
have caused those present to acquire empathy for the one at whom they 
have been pointing, thus restoring a semblance of that freak’s humanity. 
However, while this gaze reversal could have humanized the Phantom, 
making him someone with whom the audience could empathize, the way 
that the film consistently animalizes this character prevents such a reaction, 
creating a tension between the freakifying gaze, its reversal, and the 
portrayal of the freak himself.

THE MIRROR AND MASK AS MODERATORS FOR THE GAZE
 Two ways that this film endeavors to construct the Phantom as a 
freak is through its use of the mirror and the mask. Scholars like Grover-
Friedlander and Andrew P. Williams have discussed the presence of mirrors 
in the film, but the connection between these set devices and freakification 
has yet to be explored. Williams focuses on the mirror as “mark[ing] the 
boundary between the patriarchal code of Raoul and the exotic mysteries 
of the ‘sexual other’” (92). By contrast, Grover-Friedlander looks a bit closer 
at the film’s reflection in its many mirrors, agreeing that their main power 
is in their ability to transform the characters but also noting their implied 

Hampshire

123



connection to power dynamics. According to this author, mirrors emphasize 
the ways that “the voice of the Phantom will overpower the prima donna’s 
voice” and how they later “signify the Phantom’s loss of power over the 
prima donna’s voice when Christine crosses through the mirror and sees 
him: the mirror becomes merely one of the Phantom’s [fetishized] objects 
underneath the opera house, and at that point it has lost all power” (189).
 Missing from this discussion is an examination of the implications 
mirrors have for freakification. For any individual whose physical 
appearance has served as the catalyst for societal freakification, the image in 
a mirror can understandably range from causing depression to inciting rage. 
The implication that the gaze—particularly at one’s self—is something to be 
feared is evident when Raoul and Leddoux of the Secret Police “‘have fallen 
into the room of many mirrors—the old torture chamber!’” (1:22:42). The 
idea of having mirrors in a torture chamber is both logical and haunting: 
not only would the objects of torture be in agony, but they would be seeing 
the acts and the results of those actions on their physical bodies as they 
occur, creating implications of psychological torment in this scene that stem 
from the mirrors themselves. Likewise, the Phantom here demonstrates 
that, from his perspective, seeing oneself is the ultimate form of torture. As 
society has freakified Erik throughout his life, he has grown to associate his 
physical appearance as the source of this torment. Seeing himself is thus 
equated to torture in this moment, demonstrating the inherent connection 
between being freakified and being tortured.
 However, the Phantom turns what could be objects of loathing 
into portals through which he gazes upon the object of his obsession: the 
beautiful Christine. As Williams observes, the two-way mirror in Christine’s 
dressing room allows the Phantom to “gaze into the mirror and see the 
beauty” instead of “the painful realities of his own reflection” (92). Instead of 
coming to terms with his freakishness, he channels that energy into creating 
the perfect woman, training her through vocal instruction and conditioning 
her to call him “Master” (21:57). In this way, the Phantom continues to 
reverse the gaze away from himself—who cannot see himself in the two-way 
mirror—and onto Christine. By thus manipulating their use, he transforms 
the mirrors that would present him with his own “deformities” into access 
points to socially acceptable beauty.
 A key point to emphasize here is the way that the conventional 

Hampshire

124



gaze between the freak and the normate—which appears countless times 
throughout the film—is reversed through the mirror. Throughout the first 
half hour, Erik has been watching Christine, gazing upon her, with and 
without her consent, through the one-way mirror. Indeed, he “does not 
appear in person until the fourth reel of this production, but his shadow 
manifestations are said to be enough to enthrall the spectators” (“Lon 
Chaney Plays Role”). Since he does not appear right away, it is through his 
intertitle lines and descriptions from other characters that the audience 
builds their initial impression of him. 
 Erik controls his image by restricting access to it through hiding (both 
out of sight and behind a mask), but he frames the first real encounter with 
Christine as a privilege for the young singer. Prior to his appearance in 
her dressing room, he says, “Soon, Christine, this spirit will take form and 
command your love!” to which she responds, “Call for me when you will. 
I shall be waiting” (22:20). When he finally comes for her, she is “ready, 
Master—waiting!” to finally meet him, and he tells her to “[w]alk to your 
mirror, my dear—have no fear!” (32:20), giving her permission to see him, 
albeit still in a restricted sense as he keeps his mask on. 
 Prior to his unmasking, it appears that Erik might be the same as 
other men, even if he seems a bit socially awkward and sleeps in a coffin. 
However, at the moment of the unmasking, the audience faces an entirely 
new being. After Christine takes off his mask, “[n]o longer needing to hide 
his ‘otherness,’ Erik’s tender appeals for love disappear,” to be replaced with 
animalistic, violent forwardness (Williams 93-94). 
 Like the anatomical museums that were declining alongside the 
freak shows (finally closing their doors in the 1930s), this moment splits 
the character in two. These exhibits displayed “the Body with a capital 
B, separate from, deprived of, punished by, or in rebellion against, a 
moralizing, rationalizing, disciplining Spirit” (Sappol). Likewise, the spirit 
of Erik truly becomes separated in this moment from the physical body 
and social construction of the monstrous Phantom. This transformation is 
indicative of one of the main ways that this film creates a cinematic freak 
show: by presenting Erik as an animal, the movie plays into a larger trend 
of framing those with disabilities as something less than human, thus 
rendering them outside of the same moral purview that might hinder one’s 
ability to fully freakify the individual. 

Hampshire

125



 The exact moment when Christine takes off the mask marks a 
turning point in the film where it shifts definitively into the genre of horror. 
According to a review from the time of the film’s premier, “The scene 
wherein curiosity impels her to remove his mask is said to be manipulated 
so that the simple act of slipping off the disguise furnishes excitement” 
(“Lon Chaney Plays Role”). Indeed, the intertitle sets the scene as the 
Phantom proclaims, “Yet listen—there sounds an ominous undercurrent of 
warning!” (49:23). 
 As Christine reaches for the mask, her face bears an expression of 
anticipation that quickly turns to horror when the mask finally comes off 
(50:20). For the next two minutes, the camera switches between direct face 
shots of Lon Chaney (the actor playing the Phantom in this film), bearing a 
wide-eyed, gaped-mouth, inhuman expression, and full scene shots of him 
looming over Christine’s fearful huddled form. He grabs her face, forcing 
her to look upon him, with the words, “Feast your eyes—glut your soul, on 
my accursed ugliness!” (51:20). In his action and word choice, we find a sense 
of violence in the gaze he invites; instead of a more permissive request 
or a gentler touch, the Phantom is demanding that she look at him, while 
physically not giving her any choice in the matter. 
 Here, the Phantom becomes, like freak show exhibits, a personification 
of anxiety about physical difference in such a way that impairs one’s ability 
to empathize with him. The particular appearance of the Phantom’s face 
in this moment establishes definitively what the film has been hinting at 
thus far: that Erik is something less than human. His face is presented 
as distorted, practically beyond recognition as a human face. As Grover-
Friedlander describes, 

[T]he visual image is stretched out, formless, transgressive, 
shapeless, emphasizing the hollowness of the skull, the 
beastliness of the eye, nose and mouth cavities, and the lack of 
humanity in the Phantom’s face. Described in terms of orifices 
and cavities—noseless visage, black holes instead of eyes—the 
Phantom’s face is the negative of a human face, a trace of a 
human body, a literally phantom-like living corpse. (188)

Previous to this moment, there have only been rumors of his appearance 
to feed the audience’s curiosity, and these descriptions vary and even 
contradict each other, like when the dancers “saw him for an instant—a 

Hampshire

126



gray shadow—and he was gone!,” and they cannot agree if he had a nose 
or not (10:34). Thus far, the Phantom is less than human in his ghostlike 
elusiveness; however, in this moment of unmasking, the audience members, 
with Christine, get to see for themselves. Here, inhumanity transitions 
from ethereal and elusive to material and monstrous. The film constructs 
an inhuman and unsympathetic character, and the way the unmasking is 
presented emphasizes these efforts. 
 From this moment forward, the film includes several scenes and 
intertitle word choices that emphasize the animalistic portrayal that plays 
into the freakification of this character. Twice, Christine directly calls him a 
“monster” when talking to Raoul (1:00:24, 1:08:20). Additionally, the phrase 
permeated the film’s reviews, calling him “the inhuman monster of iniquity” 
(“Lon Chaney Plays Role”). This specific word has great implications on 
the freakification of an individual because, by using this term, Christine 
designates that his status as a human being is not only in question, but that it 
is beyond hope—he is not only monstrous, but a monster. 
 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the implications of this 
term are clear. The original definition of the word was “a mythical creature 
which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more 
animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appearance,” 
and the later and more general definition is “any imaginary creature that 
is large, ugly, and frightening.” Another definition it provides is “a person 
of repulsively unnatural character, or exhibiting such extreme cruelty or 
wickedness as to appear inhuman” (“Monster”). Together, these definitions 
demonstrate the implications of the term the film uses to identify the 
Phantom: Erik is presented as ugly, frightening, and repulsive, somewhere 
in the liminal space between human and animal—the same space to which 
the freak show banished such real-life performers as Joseph Merrick (the 
Elephant Man), Stephan Bibrowsky (Lionel, the Lion-Faced Boy), and P.T. 
Barnum’s “What is It?” exhibit. According to Thomson, 

the freak show defined and exhibited the ‘abnormal.’ By 
highlighting ostensible human anomaly of every sort and 
combination, Barnum’s exhibits challenged audiences not 
only to classify and explain what they saw, but to relate the 
performance to themselves, to American individual and 
collective identity (“The Cultural Work of American Freak 

Hampshire

127



Shows” 58).
Indeed, the use of the term “monster” plays into a history of exploring 
and exploiting liminality within the freak show: according to Thomson, 
“the word monster [is] perhaps the earliest and most enduring name for 
the singular body.... By challenging the boundaries of the human and the 
coherence of what seemed to be the natural world, monstrous bodies 
appeared as sublime, merging the terrible with the wonderful, equalizing 
repulsion with attraction” (“Introduction” 3).
 This aspect of the character aligns with Thesis III of Jeffrey Jerome 
Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” which is that “the monster is the 
harbinger of category crisis.” Within this section of his work, he explains,

[The] refusal to participate in the classificatory “order of things” 
is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose 
externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in 
any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, 
a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash 
distinctions. (6)

By the very nature of his existence and the way that he is perceived by the 
normate (coupled with how the film consistently places emphasis on a 
monstrous portrayal), the Phantom is a monster of hybridization. The fact 
that people cannot easily classify him as man or beast is cause for anxiety 
and fear, as is reflected on the faces of the other characters in the movie 
who see him without his mask—not to mention on those of the audience 
members who saw the film when it came out in 1925.
 Beyond the moment of unmasking, the importance placed upon the 
necessity of the mask at the beginning likewise emphasizes the scenes in 
which the Phantom foregoes it. There is a significant difference between 
how the Phantom acts with his mask and without it. Most notably, his 
change of attitude toward its absence is worth examining. At first, when 
Christine takes it off, he is distraught and violent and even appears to cover 
his face and cry at one point (50:30). However, after this moment when the 
mystery has been lost and he knows that Christine cannot unsee what she 
has seen, this element of shame falls by the wayside in favor of exaggerated 
expressions and anger. 
 After the scenes at the Bal Masque de l’Opera, Christine and Raoul 
retreat to the opera’s roof to talk, while the Phantom secretly leers down 

Hampshire

128



at them from the gargoyles above (59:42). When Christine proclaims 
that “[h]e is a monster—a loathsome beast! You must save me from him, 
Raoul!” (1:00:24), Erik’s gestures and facial expressions align him with 
the gothic statues; Chaney performs without the mask as the Phantom’s 
cloak billows in the wind in a stark parody of the visible angel statues. The 
cinematography and acting in this scene show how, without his mask, Erik 
has fallen from the angels of love and music to become one of the opera 
house’s most intimidating gargoyles. 
 The appearance of these particular forms of architectural adornment 
creates its own set of implications. According to Cohen, “Gargoyles and 
ornately sculpted grotesques, lurking at the crossbeams or upon the roof of 
the cathedral, likewise record the liberating fantasies of a bored or repressed 
hand suddenly freed to populate the margins” (17-18). This scene aligns the 
Phantom with these same sentiments; he embodies that feeling of liberation 
and freedom that come with being on the edges of society, of not belonging 
to the normate population. He embraces his monster status in this moment 
and joins the gargoyles in their inhuman and terrifying freedom, which 
threatens the safety of innocents like Christine and Raoul.
 Another moment where his sans-mask human status comes into 
question is when he stalks Raoul’s boat in the underground lagoon as the 
lover searches for Christine. Just after insisting that he is “a human like other 
men” (1:23:12), he contradicts this statement with his actions as he uses his 
cane to breathe underwater, implying that he is a creature from the deep. 
This is only intensified when he emerges from the depths later, framed in a 
manner that makes him look even less “human” than usual (1:27:05). 
 Likewise, the Phantom contradicts his claims to humanity with his 
language. At one point, he compares himself to a toad, saying “No longer 
like a toad in these foul cellars will I secrete the venom of hatred—for you 
shall bring me love!” (1:21:32). In addition to these animalistic portrayals, he 
also often refers to himself as a spirit, demonstrating a dichotomy between 
his aspirations to be more than human and his treatment as less than 
human. This spiritual element, though, is not always presented in a positive 
light. For example, at the beginning, he frames himself as Christine’s spirit 
guide of music; later, he calls her an “ungrateful fool,” saying, “You have 
spurned the spirit that inspired you—the spirit that made you great!... Now, 
you shall see the evil spirit that makes my evil face!” (1:21:01). This aligns 

Hampshire

129



with the preconception with which many in the audience could have walked 
in, for frequently “the trope of disability is used to connote evil” (Randell 71).
 Later, while driving the cart without his mask, he is depicted with 
an expression that reads as crazed and even non-sentient. He throws the 
cart’s driver to the ground and boards the front bench quickly, with a dazed 
Christine in the backseat. He maintains this expression throughout this 
scene, laughing and staring directly at the camera, confronting the audience 
with his freakishness (1:42:20). In the film’s final moments, as he runs from 
the angry mob, he suddenly seems to become aware of his face’s nakedness, 
attempting to cover it with his cloak (1:43:47). 
 In this moment, the tension between his masked and mask-less selves 
comes forward as he faces the way the rest of humanity sees him. Although 
he has himself contributed to the construction of his freakification, that 
position was originally bestowed by society, which is now embodied in 
the angry mob. As the film’s freak, it is necessary that some segment 
of the normate populace destroy him in the end; Cohen explains that 
monsters must meet this kind of sticky end because of the way that they 
are “transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker; and so the 
monster and all that it embodies must be exiled or destroyed” (16). In these 
final moments, though, Erik clings to his humanity and hides the physical 
deformities that were the focus of his original ostracism in a last-ditch effort 
to deconstruct, or at least deflect, freakish identity; however, while there 
may be a happy ending for Christine and Raoul, Erik gets no such mercy in 
a tragic end to a miserable, fundamentally misunderstood, character who 
really only desired to be loved. This purpose became hopelessly distorted 
from the moment Christine removed that mask.

CINEMATIC CHOICES: THE ROLE OF SETTING AND CASTING IN ERIK’S 
FREAKIFICATION
 Besides props like the mirror and the mask, the film’s use of set also 
works to create the monstrous portrayal of the Phantom. As a 1925 review of 
the film states, 

Most of the more horrible and impressive scenes of the picture 
take place in the cellars and sub-cellars of the opera house where 
one’s appetite for thrills is regaled with ghostlike shadows, trap 
doors working unexpectedly, an underground lake and torture 

Hampshire

130



chambers in which one may be smothered with heat or suffer 
almost any untold agony. (“‘Phantom of Opera,’ New Film at 
Astor”)

The dramatic difference between the dark, dismal cellars and the light, 
beautiful opera house creates a distinction between those who inhabit 
these spaces. The film establishes this division early on, from the first 
intertitle: “Sanctuary of song lovers, The Paris Opera House, rising nobly 
over medieval torture chambers, hidden dungeons, long forgotten” (2:57). 
Following are establishing shots of the opera’s beautiful architecture and 
interior. Then, viewers witness a perfectly choreographed performance 
of two hundred dancers (“Paris Opera Reproduced”), all of whom look 
identical, moving as one. This establishes the societal ideal that is reinforced 
by the audience’s applause. The set and dancers present a society where 
conformity is key, and where aesthetic beauty is necessary for acceptance, 
directly contrasting with the Phantom, who is alone and monstrous.
 When the Phantom enters this realm of beauty, the film shows the 
disastrous results of this mingling. In addition to the ways that he causes 
psychological and physical harm to the heroes, the set demonstrates this 
point through the chandelier. Clearly the pride of the opera house, the 
Phantom causes it to fall, leading to pandemonium in the crowd (28:52). 
The chandelier’s wreckage is symbolic of the perceived destruction of social 
order and beauty that occur when a freak breeches the outside world and 
pursues beauty. This scene of set destruction reinforces the preconceptions 
that audience members would have had based on freak shows, a context 
that would have insinuated that the freak, being less than human, does not 
belong in the company of man.
 In an examination of the sleeping quarters, viewers can see an 
additional way that the Phantom’s less-than-human status in society has 
permeated his definition of self. In the cellars, the Phantom possesses two 
places for sleeping: an ornate boat-shaped bed that he bequeaths unto an 
unconscious Christine (43:38), and a coffin he identifies as his own, a bed 
which “keeps me reminded of other dreamless sleep that cures all ills—
forever!” (42:11). The contrast between these two beds and their implications 
demonstrate how he sees himself as less than human, as a living corpse of a 
man incapable of rejoining the society of people even in such simple ways 
as his own choice of amenities. The socially constructed position of the 

Hampshire

131



freak that he occupies has permeated his views of himself to the point where 
he doesn’t need other people to tell him he’s a freak—he affirms this title 
himself regularly. 
 In order to create the most freakish character possible, this film chose 
to have the Phantom played by actor Lon Chaney, who “was recognized for 
his portrayal of grotesques: physically malformed, or disfigured, afflicted, 
and stigmatized” (Conrich 46). Throughout his career as an actor, he had 
the roles of a variety of disabled characters, such as Quasimodo in The 
Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and a cripple in The Miracle Man (1919). In 
“Lon Chaney Plays Role of Paris Opera Phantom,” a New York Times review 
of the film from 1925, the author discusses the importance of this casting 
choice. Chaney was known for playing the disabled: “Mr. Chaney... made 
a specialty of appearing as a distorted or crippled person” (“Lon Chaney 
Plays Role”).  So, by choosing Chaney for the role, this film plays into the 
expectations that the audience members would have had for a Chaney 
monstrosity. 
 Indeed, another review stated that with this film the actor “adds 
another gruesome, and this time spooky, characterization to his [list] of 
interpretations.” This particular review actually cites Chaney’s portrayal 
of the Phantom as perhaps going too far: “there is something wanting 
in... sincere characterization. This is partly because in the leading role 
Lon Chaney is so much taken up with being hideous and with giving the 
audience the horrors that he has forgotten to be a bit human as well” (“New 
Film at Astor”). This critique of the film demonstrates how people viewing 
the film at the time of its release would have been aware of the way that 
Chaney’s portrayal freakifies Erik to the point of losing his humanity. By 
playing his monstrous character almost too well, Chaney engages with the 
same practices freak shows used to distance their performers from their 
patrons. Instead of a human, empathetic response to the disabled person, 
the viewers are instead encouraged to see them as nothing more than freaks. 
 This can be partially attributed to the film’s time period. According 
to Karen Randell, “It is possible to see this repeated motif of the deformed 
and disfigured man in Chaney’s films as a deferred or latent representation 
of the disabled veteran” (70). However, while she believes that the film “both 
exhibits the body as fascinatingly grotesque and portrays the damaged 
male body as a site for sympathetic response” (76), I argue that the actor and 

Hampshire

132



setting alike animalize Erik beyond the point of empathy. By manipulating 
the gaze, emphasizing pointing, and dehumanizing the character, the film 
engages with the same practices as freak shows, while complicating them 
with the nuances of the new medium. 

CONCLUSION
 When Erik responds to Christine’s accusation by stating, “If I am the 
Phantom, it is because man’s hatred has made me so” (42:33), he points to 
the nature of freakification: freaks occupy a socially-constructed position. 
Similarly, the film constructs this position via its participation in and 
reversal of the gaze, emphasis on dramatic gesticulations, tropes like the 
mirror and the mask, and cast/set decisions. These practices are eerily 
reminiscent of the ways that freak show directors would carefully construct 
the identities of their performers. Thus, the 1925 version of The Phantom 
of the Opera extends the social construct of the freak into a cinematic 
construction of the monstrous portrayal so that, while the freak shows may 
have been closing their doors, the legacy of the freak show lived on.

Hampshire

133



WORKS CITED

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses). Monster Theory: 
Reading Culture. Minneapolis: Regents of the University of Minnesota, 
1996. 3-25. Print.

Conrich, Ian. “Before Sound: Universal, Silent Cinema, and the Last of 
the Horror-Spectaculars.” The Horror Film. Ed. Stephen Prince. New 
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 40-57. Print.

Grover-Friedlander, Michal. “‘The Phantom of the Opera’: The Lost Voice 
of Opera in Silent Film.” Cambridge Opera Journal 11.2 (1999): 179-192. 
JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov 2015.

King, Norman. “The Sound of Silents.” Silent Film. Ed. Richard Abel. New 
Brunswick: Rutgers Univerity Press, 1996. 31-44. Web. 16 Nov 2015.

“Lon Chaney Plays Role of Paris Opera Phantom.” New York Times 6 
September 1925: 5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times. 
Web. 16 Nov 2015.

 “Monster, n., adv., and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 
2015. Web. 3 Feb 2016.

“Paris Opera Reproduced.” New York Times 15 March 1925: 5. ProQuest 
Historical Newspapers: The New York Times. Print. 

“‘Phantom of Opera,’ New Film at Astor, Impresses by Setting: Lon Chaney 
Gives Gruesome and Spooky Interpretation of ‘Erik.’” Women’s Wear 
8 Sept 1925: 6, 15. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Women’s Wear Daily 
Archive. Web. 16 Nov 2015.

Prince, Stephen. “Introduction: The Dark Genre and Its Paradoxes.” The 
Horror Film. Ed. Stephen Prince. New Brunswick: Rutgers University 
Press, 2004. 1-11. Print.

Hampshire

134



Randell, Karen. “Mad Love: The Anxiety of Difference in the Films of Lon 
Chaney Sr.” Screening the Dark Side of Love: From European Horror to 
American Cinema. Eds. Karen Randell and Karen A. Ritzenhoff. New 
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 69-81. MLA International Bibliography. 
Print.

Sappol, Michael. “‘Morbid Curiosity’: The Decline and Fall of the Popular 
Anatomical Museum.” Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early 
American Life 4.2 (2004): n.p. Web. 19 Oct 2015.

“The Phantom of the Opera (1925) (Silent).” Online video. Amazon Prime, n.d. 
Web. 10 Mar 2016. 

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. “The Cultural Work of American Freak 
Shows, 1835-1940.” Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in 
American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 
1997. 55-80. Print

---. “Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse 
in Modernity.” Freakery. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: 
New York University Press, 1996. 1-19. Print.

Williams, Andrew P. “The Silent Threat: A (Re)Viewing of the ‘Sexual Other’ 
in The Phantom of The Opera and Nosferatu.” The Midwest Quarterly 38.1 
(1996): 90-101. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 24 Nov 2015. 

Hampshire

135


