Phantom of the Opera (1924) is a classic horror film and was a perfect example of certain points in Katerina Bantinaki’s “Paradox of Horror.” Feelings of anxiety, dread, and discomfort that usually accompany a fear, such as a movie, are much less intense when we are able to control how much we take in from the source of the fear, as Bantinaki pointed out that Morreall argued (Bantinaki, 385). This was at the forefront of my mind as I watched Phantom; it makes sense that this was regarded as one of the scariest films of all time… in its time. I had much more control sitting at my desk, watching the movie on my small laptop screen than any audience member watching this horrifying monster reveal itself on a screen as big as their house.
One of Bantinaki’s main points is that fear can elicit multiple emotions, not all of which are negative. A commonality in enjoying horror is curiosity (Bantinaki, 384), which I found to be one of the themes of this particular film. Audiences showed up to watch this film because ultimately, they wanted to know what was behind the mask, what the Phantom really was. They knew it was a horror movie; they knew they would be scared, but their need to know overruled their rationality of fear. I think that’s what made the Phantom so terrifying in the film and in real life. The characters in the film were scared because they didn’t know what he was, and when they discovered the truth, they hated him for it and ended up killing him. Real-life audiences are scared because they didn’t know what he was up until a certain point, and then they’re scared because he’s everything that society has told them is bad. Classic horror conventions such as the advanced shadowplay (heavily in the beginning before we see Phantom’s form. 00:09:54) a story centered around love (Chaney 00:40:13), and the fall of the monster (01:45:35) pushed this film.