ABSTRACT
The Phantom of the Opera, with Lon Chaney in the title role of Erik, the mad masked genius terrorising the staff and patrons of the Palais Garnier opera house in belle eque Paris, was intended as a follow-up to The Hunchback's success. In a way, it offered a similar plot in which a beautiful young woman was entangled in a dangerous love triangle and torn between a dashing aristocrat and a man believed to be a monster. The supernatural threat was eventually explained as a masquerade aiming to induce a confession from a human culprit, orchestrated by a detective, whose role Chaney also played. Lon Chaney's highly specialised assortment of roles played with the sensationalist expectations of the public while providing a reassuring certainty that it was all pretence. Chaney's peculiar mixture of terror and suffering has been an important, although now often forgotten, influence on the development of horror movies, making him the pioneer in Gothic acting.
