I made an ass of myself in the theatre during the Phantom of the Opera silent movie showing tonight by bursting into laughter.
Halfway through the film – and after months of coaching from a mysterious shadowy figure that lives in the haunted opera – Christine meets him face to face for the first time and descends into his lair, as promised. She’s understandably creeped out, and there’s a long sequence where they make their way through his cartoonish death traps in his deep underground dungeon. She notices his coffin bed and he explains that he’s really goth, and ONLY THEN does she figure it out and go “Oooh shit, YOU must be the Phantom! Like from the title of the movie!”
Did she…. did she think that the mysterious spooky man who lived in the haunted opera was someone other than the guy famous for being a mysterious spooky man who lived in the haunted opera?
I know Too Much about this.
So Phantom was originally a book published in French in 1909, which was adapted into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1986. The silent movie came out in 1925, before the story was synonymous with actual singing.
To answer your question: when Christine was a child her father talked to her about a muse called the Angel of Music who was, of course, fictional. When he was dying, he told her that he would send the Angel to watch over her. So when a spooky guy showed up and played her music and began to teach her how to sing, she figured ‘this must be the Angel my dad said he’d send, cool.’
Classic case of mistaken identity.
It’s only after she figured out that he’s goff as hell, that she realizes that he is not an angel, and it was the creepy opera ghost who was teaching her to sing.
“Oh no… no angel would have this many Cure albums… or a sign on the door that says ‘no prepz…”
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