I had never really considered this until reading your post, but compared to other versions of the film, this Phantom does seem a bit more “mild” when viewing his apparently “grotesque” features. The Phantom of the Opera is one of my favourite films and I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your postings on it! Your discussion of the way in which the filmmaker’s sanitized the Phantom’s disability was particularly interesting and insightful. We want the audience to see his attractiveness, his anger and his vulnerability.”

It was about trying to find the real person behind the mask. As she sings, ‘This haunted face holds no horror for me now / It’s in your soul that the true distortion lies.’” Alexandra Byrne, the film’s costume designer, echoes this idea: “We didn’t want his disfigurement to be horribly grotesque. Christine, however, always looks past that and views him with compassion. The Phantom is very disfigured and the right side of his face is quite tragic. “Even though the make-up in the stage show is grotesque, and very much a copy of the Lon Chaney make-up, I felt the audience is smarter than a lot of obvious prosthetics. In one interview, director Joel Schumacher talks about the conscious decision to downplay the Phantom’s traditionally dramatic deformity. In the stage show, the Phantom’s disfigurement is much more severe. Christine’s description hardly matches reality: the “distortion” is mild, and–especially for 1870, before the rise of modern medicine and plastic surgery–hardly the stuff of circus freak shows.

Rather than allowing the viewer to see the Phantom’s true appearance as Christine does and visualize that for the remainder of the story, the camera work serves to further distance the viewer from the Phantom as he truly is.įinally, in the last few minutes of the movie, the audience is allowed to see the Phantom’s face. She later describes it as “so distorted, deformed, it was hardly a face,” but the camera carefully avoids a clear view of the deformity, further tantalizing the audience. At one point in the first half of the film, Christine pulls off his mask and sees the face beneath. Throughout both the film and stage versions of the musical, the unspoken question “what is beneath the Phantom’s mask?” is used to build suspense.

Michael Crawford as the original stage Phantom

Phantom of the opera 2004 unmasked