I know it’s gauche to discuss a movie’s marketing instead of its content, but the 1989 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera is an especially peculiar case.  Clearly, the best way to sell the film would be to piggyback off star Robert Englund’s success in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, especially since Freddy Kreuger’s make-up designer Kevin Yagher tagged along to apply the exact same make-up to this public-domain franchise.  The video store poster for The Phantom of the Opera tiptoes as close as it can to declaring “Freddy Kreuger is the Phantom of the Opera” without getting sued by New Line.  It’s not exactly false advertising, either.  The entire Phantom story is told as one long dream-sequence journey into the past, where a wisecracking Englund in the gooey Freddy makeup slashes down every fool who gets in the way of the young ingenue he wants to transform into an opera star.  What that premise doesn’t convey is that the film also adopts a romantic stage-theatre tone, playing like a throwback to classic Hammer Horror (or, at times, Masterpiece Theatre) that offers a classier, more literary take on the genre.  That’s the version of Phantom of the Opera you were sold if you happen to catch the film’s trailer, which shows you all of the period-piece tragic romance of the plot with none of the flayed-alive gorehound grue that frequently interrupts it. 

Setting up a modern-day sequel that never came to be (The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror in Manhattan), our story starts in 1980s New York City, where The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen is auditioning to become a professional opera singer.  There’s a stage prop accident during her audition that smashes her into a mirror realm so, naturally, she travels back in time to a past life in 19th Century London, again working as a hopeful opera singer.  Only, the past version of herself is supported by a mysterious benefactor who skulks around the rafters and dungeons of the theatre, acting as her “angel” (through mentorship and murder) but carefully staying out of the spotlight.  According to the title, Englund is strictly playing the Phantom of the Opera here, but his character details are a hodgepodge amalgamation of the Phantom, Faust, Jack the Ripper and, of course, Freddy Kreuger.  The theatrical setting offers the film a classy surface aesthetic, like a straight-to-video version of Argento’s Opera.  The Phantom’s quipping & mugging in the extreme-gore kill scenes drags it back down to the base pleasures of a by-the-numbers slasher, though, which is a fun contrast to the stately background setting.  Then, when the story eventually smashes back through the looking glass to modern-day New York, bringing along Phantom Freddy with it, it’s even more fun to briefly see that dynamic flipped.

I always got the sense that Robert Englund never wanted to be fully pigeonholed as a Horror Guy, much less as Freddy Kreuger.  If nothing else, he commiserates with fellow reluctant-horror-icon Wes Craven over that professional disappointment in A New Nightmare, where the actor & director find a way to flex their more erudite offscreen personae under the Freddy Kreuger brand.  In The Phantom of the Opera, he’s clearly attempting to stray from the Freddy Krueger schtick into something more literary, but the furthest away he was allowed to get was emulating Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  It doesn’t help that he’s wearing the Freddy makeup beneath his Phantom mask, which is stitched together from harvested patches of discolored human flesh.  That dual make-up layering is mirrored in the film’s double-exposure imagery during more surreal moments where the story travels time, echoes Faust, or underlines the Phantom’s extraordinary powers as a supernatural killer.  So much of the Phantom plays like a standard BBC adaptation of a literary classic that it’s shocking when an especially beautiful or grotesque image punches through: a vibrant shock of red fabric, a flayed man transformed into a human puppet, the Phantom posed in Mario Bava color-gel artifice, etc.  It may not be the career turn that Englund was hoping for, but it does offer a lovely, volatile contrast between the career he wished he had and the career he actually had, violently juxtaposed in real time.

-Brandon Ledet