The Lark Cinema Club: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

The Lark Cinema Club: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

About the film

Few films understand theatre as a place of beauty and terror quite like The Phantom of the Opera.

Released in 1925, the film turns the Paris Opera House into a world of masks, mirrors, trapdoors, chandeliers, secret passages, and subterranean shadows. Above ground, there is music, glamour, and performance. Below, there is obsession.

At the centre of the film is Lon Chaney, one of silent cinema’s great physical actors, giving one of his most famous performances. His Phantom is tragic, terrifying, grotesque, vulnerable, and theatrical all at once. The famous unmasking remains one of the great shock moments in early horror cinema.

As the first October screening in The Lark Cinema Club launch season, The Phantom of the Opera bridges cinema and stage beautifully. For an arts venue, it has an extra charge: a film about performance, architecture, music, and the strange life of the unseen spaces beneath a theatre.

It is gothic cinema with grandeur – and an ideal beginning to the club’s Halloween month.

Topics

Screenings

More Film & Cinema

See all events