The ground-breaking film, in its blurry and shaky shooting, upped the creepy factor brilliantly and intensified the fear by setting up for the audience in gruesome detail how grotesque the disfigurement of the phantom actually was long before he was unmasked.Įven though I viewed the 2004 remake shortly after it was released, a good ten years before I watched the original, I had the thought after watching the earlier film as I typically do after watching Japanese anime.
Still, Schumacher could not overcome the direction of Rupert Julian's silent film original. Granted, he had a lot of great material to work with. That being said, he actually did a decent job at directing the remake of Phantom of the Opera. While he had several good films early in his career and decent films in recent years, he is probably most well-known for effectively ruining the Batman franchise with Batman Forever and Batman & Robin in the mid- to late-90s (which he was actually nominated for a Razzie as worst director for the latter film), forcing a brilliant reboot of the franchise in the late 2000s by Christopher Nolan. Right off the bat I want to cringe at even the mention of Schumacher's name. Notice that the original paints the phantom as a mad, deranged figure-understandable as the original is considered a horror film-whereas the remake makes him out to be a musical genius-fitting for an adaptation based on a stage play.ĭIRECTOR: Rupert Julian vs. The synopses for both films are relatively similar. SYNOPSIS (2004): A young soprano becomes the obsession of a disfigured musical genius who lives beneath the Paris Opera House. SYNOPSIS (1925): A mad, disfigured composer seeks love with a lovely young opera singer. The classic and unforgettable organ in Webber's version is powerful and instrumental, pun intended, in its driving force in announcing the phantom and using its deep tones to strike fear in the hearts of the audience. While one is the beloved adaptation of the celebrated novel written by Gaston Leroux, the other is strictly adapted from Andrew Lloyd Webber's book and stage play.
But as this is a blog written specifically to compare the original to the remake, so then shall we look at the first and most recent films. Many versions of this classic movie exist, both on the big and small screen, especially since Andrew Lloyd Webber brought the musical to the stage in 1986.