To be entirely fair, the rest of the movie plays down the brutality of the story, and Phantom of the Operafocuses more on the technicolour glory of the opera and the costumes than it does on any of the characters or the monster. There’s no denying that it’s there, but it’s certainly no less explicit than the creepy necrophiliac subtext that runs through The Mummy. It seems strange that the studio would baulk at the theme. It is vaguely reassuring to know that studios have been hacking up movies for quite some time, and finished cuts of movies that don’t make any sense are by no means a modern invention. However, the studio figured that there’d be a none-too-subtle incest theme there when the Phantom abducts Christine and takes her into the sewers with him, so they hastily deleted the subplot – including scenes that had already been filmed between the two leads. He was a father trying to look out for his daughter. It turns out that Erique was to be revealed as Christine’s father, who had abandoned her mother and felt guilty about it. Watching the movie, it’s quite clear that the story itself underwent quite a bit of revision both during and after shooting, and there’s a sense of absence at the heart of the film. In fact, in the finished cut of the film, a lot of inexplicable things happen – towards the climax, Garron deflects Raoul’s gun in order to save the phantom, despite the fact that the man is a mass-murderer. Erique Claudin is mysteriously (and anonymously) sponsoring young opera starlet Christine Dubois, but we never really find out why. However, the biggest problem is the fact that the central relationship is very poorly defined. The Phantom’s brutality is retained – he’s still a repeated murderer and the story keeps the most iconic of the set-pieces – but the Phantom feels more like an ineffectual loser than a true movie monster. I wonder if that’s also the reason that he’s never really portrayed as that much of a monster, even in the depths of his insanity. Apparently Claude Rains was afraid of being typecast as a “freak”, and so the eponymous character’s scars are significantly downplayed.

Of course, the production history of Phantom of the Opera suggests that there are a lot of reasons why the finished product ends up so mangled.

The phantom of the opera 1943