By moonlight and candle smoke, let us descend into the catacombs of time. There, amongst the cobwebbed corridors of cultural memory, a figure haunts us still—his name whispered on velvet drapes and echoed in opera houses long silenced. The Phantom of the Opera: a spectre born not of flesh alone but of longing, madness, and cinematic obsession. It is now a century since his shadow first flickered upon the silver screen, and yet his masked visage remains unforgotten, undiminished, and disturbingly intimate.

Permit me, dear reader, to wax poetic with ink black as midnight and sentiment heavy as incense in a Parisian crypt. This is no mere stroll through the decades, no dusty archival detour. What lies ahead is an exhumation—an ecstatic disinterment of film reels, fractured dreams, and fevered interpretations. Think of this as less historical treatise, more seance. A communion with the many faces of Erik, our melancholy maestro.

And oh, what faces he has worn: from the silent scream of Lon Chaney’s skull-like transformation to the velvet purr of Claude Rains, the bombast of Herbert Lom, the tragic pout of Robert Englund, and the rock-god theatrics of Gerard Butler. Each incarnation a mirror, cracked and trembling, reflecting the anxieties of its age. What began as Gaston Leroux’s pulp romance has since metastasised into a grand gothic opera of celluloid and shadow.

In this anthology, we shall waltz with these ghosts. We shall trace the inkblots of adaptation and mutation. We shall praise and pillory. We shall wonder aloud at the strange endurance of this story, and why it refuses to go gentle into that cinematic night.

For the Phantom is not merely a character. He is myth wearing greasepaint. He is trauma recast as melody. He is beauty disfigured and thus made eternal.

Join me. The curtain rises. The chandelier trembles. The century beckons.

• Saul Muerte

The Phantom’s Legacy: Adapting Gaston Leroux for the Silent Screen