A Phantom Nobody Ordered
Dwight H. Little’s Phantom of the Opera (1989) is proof that Hollywood in the late ’80s would slap gore and latex on anything, even a 1910 French novel, and hope it made money. Spoiler: it didn’t.
The pitch must have sounded like a cocaine-fueled dare: “What if Freddy Krueger… but in a cape? What if the Phantom didn’t just sulk in basements but skinned people like Hannibal Lecter? And hey, toss in a time-traveling sandbag because who cares about continuity?”
It was a commercial flop, a critical flop, and a flop so big that Gaston Leroux probably rolled in his grave muttering, “Mon Dieu, what have they done?”
The Plot: Now With 30% More Gore, 100% Less Sense
The film opens in modern-day New York, where Christine Day (Jill Schoelen) auditions for an opera with a cursed piece of music called Don Juan Triumphant. Blood drips from the score like it was written in ketchup. She faints after a sandbag accident and wakes up in Victorian London. Yes, really. Sandbag time travel.
From there, we get a mashup of Leroux’s story and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part V:
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Erik Destler (Robert Englund), the Phantom, is cursed by the Devil so people love his music but not his face. This is what happens when you make Faustian bargains without reading the fine print.
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Christine becomes his obsession. He “teaches” her by whispering through vents like a deranged ASMR influencer.
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Instead of being tragic, Erik skins people alive to make DIY face masks. He’s less a tortured genius and more a Buffalo Bill who sings baritone.
By the end, there’s a masquerade ball, a decapitated diva, a fiery lair showdown, and Christine popping back into Manhattan as if none of it mattered. Except Destler is still alive, now moonlighting as a Broadway producer who moonlights as a dermatology experiment gone wrong.
It’s not so much a story as it is a collection of horror clichés duct-taped to an opera libretto.
Robert Englund: Freddy Goes to the Opera
Robert Englund is a horror icon. He made Freddy Krueger terrifying and charismatic, a wisecracking nightmare with a burnt face. Here, though, he’s stuck under layers of latex and melodrama.
Englund snarls, he whispers, he monologues about destiny, but he never sings. That’s right: in a film about The Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom doesn’t sing. He stabs, he skins, he gropes, he burns, but he doesn’t so much as hum a scale.
Instead of romance or pathos, we get a slasher villain with a cape. It’s like watching Freddy crash a Les Misérablesrehearsal. He’s terrifying, sure—but not in the way Leroux intended.
Christine: Damsel in Distress, on Repeat
Jill Schoelen plays Christine as if she’s wandered in from a daytime soap and hasn’t read the script. She’s perpetually wide-eyed, constantly fainting, and always torn between her jealous boyfriend Richard (Alex Hyde-White) and a sewer-dwelling skin collector.
Christine is given zero agency. She gets great reviews one night, bad reviews the next, cries in a graveyard, and spends the rest of the film either kidnapped, seduced, or screaming. Leroux’s Christine had depth; this one is a wet sponge in a corset.
Supporting Cast: Walking Red Shirts
The opera house teems with victims who exist only to pad out Erik’s skin mask collection. We get:
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Carlotta, the diva, decapitated at a masquerade like a piñata at a goth birthday party.
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A critic, slaughtered in a steam room because he gave Christine a bad review. Imagine if Roger Ebert had been murdered for giving North a thumbs down.
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A rat catcher bribed by Erik, then killed for his betrayal.
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Random stagehands, policemen, and prostitutes, all disposed of like opera programs after intermission.
Every death is nastier than it needs to be, but none are memorable. The gore has the weight of an R-rated Scooby-Doo episode: gratuitous but goofy.
The Gore: Latex, Latex Everywhere
This movie is obsessed with skin. Destler skins his victims and wears their faces like a Dollar Store Leatherface. Every other scene is an excuse for practical effects shots: flayed flesh, masks peeling off, throats slashed.
Yes, it’s gross. Yes, the effects team did their best with 1989 budgets. But it all feels so gratuitous, as if the producers worried audiences might fall asleep without a skinned torso every ten minutes. Instead of atmosphere, we get anatomy lessons. Instead of suspense, we get splatter.
The Tone: Gothic Meets Grindhouse
Here’s the real problem: the film can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it:
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A gothic romance about doomed love?
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A gory slasher flick cashing in on Englund’s Freddy fame?
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A supernatural time-travel fantasy about cursed sheet music?
Answer: all of the above, poorly. The sets try for Hammer Horror atmosphere, but the script is pure exploitation. One minute Christine is in candlelit corridors, the next Englund is peeling a face like he’s prepping a Halloween mask. The result is tonal whiplash.
The Ending: Wait, What?
After Christine torches the lair and escapes back to modern-day New York, we discover that the Phantom never died. He’s now a wealthy producer named Foster, with a secret lab of synthetic faces. Christine stabs him and tears up his music, but he may or may not survive.
It’s supposed to be shocking. Instead, it feels like the setup for a sequel nobody asked for: Phantom II: Broadway Boogaloo.
Why It Fails
This film fails because it misunderstands the appeal of The Phantom of the Opera. The story is about beauty, obsession, tragedy, and the thin line between genius and madness. It’s meant to be operatic in the true sense: heightened emotions, haunting music, doomed romance.
Here, all of that is replaced with:
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Gore instead of romance.
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Jump scares instead of music.
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Robert Englund snarling instead of singing.
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A plot so messy it makes Cats (2019) look coherent.
It doesn’t honor Leroux’s novel, it doesn’t satisfy horror fans, and it doesn’t entertain anyone except maybe latex enthusiasts.
Final Verdict
The Phantom of the Opera (1989) is what happens when producers think “add gore” is the solution to everything. It’s neither scary, nor romantic, nor musically satisfying. It’s just loud, gross, and dumb.
Robert Englund deserved better. Christine deserved better. Gaston Leroux definitely deserved better.
