Phantom of the Paradise: De Palma's Rock Opera of Faustian Rot

Phantom of the Paradise came out in 1974, died almost everywhere, and then refused to die at all. In most American cities it played to empty houses. In Winnipeg it ran for months and became a civic obsession; in Paris it was a hit; everywhere else it waited, on late-night television and worn videotape, for the audience it deserved. That audience turned out to be enormous and devoted, and half a century later Brian De Palma’s glam-rock horror musical looks less like a curio and more like the missing link between the Universal monster picture and everything gaudy and heartbroken that came after it.

It is a film that should not work. It is three separate myths stapled together, sung by a pop songwriter, directed by a man who had not yet made a thriller anyone remembers. That it works — that it moves, that it stings — is the argument worth making.

Three myths in one body

De Palma’s screenplay runs The Phantom of the Opera through Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray at the same time, and the collision is the point. Winslow Leach (William Finley) is a sensitive composer whose life’s work, a rock cantata based on Faust, is stolen by Swan (Paul Williams), a diminutive, ageless music mogul who runs a label called Death Records and is building a concert palace called the Paradise. Winslow is framed, jailed, brutalised, and finally mangled in a record-pressing machine that ruins his face and his voice. He becomes the Phantom, haunting the Paradise in a black cape and a chrome bird mask, and Swan — sensing free talent — signs him to a contract written in blood.

Every beat rhymes with an older story, and De Palma trusts you to hear the rhymes. Swan is Mephistopheles and also Dorian Gray, keeping his youth by a hidden bargain. Winslow is the Phantom and also Faust and also the artist as perpetual sucker. Phoenix (Jessica Harper, in her film debut a few years before Suspiria would make her the definitive art-horror ingénue) is the pure voice both men want to own. The pleasure of the film is watching three tragedies you already know braid into one you don’t.

Why the style is the substance

De Palma’s reputation as cinema’s great Hitchcock magpie was still forming here, and Phantom is where you can watch him assemble the toolkit. The famous set piece is a bomb planted in a stage prop, staged in a single unbroken split-screen: one half of the frame follows the ticking device, the other follows the oblivious performers, and the tension comes from your eye ricocheting between them while the clock runs. It is a direct homage to the split diopter and parallel-action grammar De Palma would spend his whole career refining, and it is already flawless — a sequence about spectacle and death that is itself pure spectacle.

The craft insight is that De Palma matches form to the film’s obsession. Phantom is about performance devouring the performer, about the machinery of the music industry turning artists into product and then into corpses on live television. So De Palma makes the camera complicit. He shoots concerts as sensory assaults, drenches the Paradise in ultraviolet and blood-red, and keeps reminding you that you are watching a show about people watching a show. When the Phantom’s music is stolen a second time and handed to a preening glam idiot named Beef (Gerrit Graham, stealing every scene he touches), the satire lands because the film has already taught you to distrust everything on a stage.

And then there is the sound. Paul Williams — a genuine hit songwriter of the era — wrote every note, and the score is the film’s secret weapon. It shape-shifts through fifties doo-wop, surf, glam and stadium bombast, each style a costume the industry forces onto the same stolen cantata. Williams also plays Swan, and casting the composer as the devil who steals the composer’s work is the kind of joke that only deepens the more you sit with it. The songs are not pastiche for its own sake; each betrayal of Winslow’s music is scored by a further degradation of it, so the soundtrack literally dramatises the theft.

The horror underneath the glitter

For all its camp, Phantom is a genuinely sad film, and that is the quality its imitators miss. Winslow’s disfigurement is played for real pain. Finley — a De Palma regular and one of the underrated faces of seventies genre film — gives the Phantom a keening, wounded physicality that survives the mask; you feel the injustice in his hunched shoulders. The film keeps its glam surface shimmering over a bedrock of despair about what ambition costs and what the culture does to the people who feed it. It is a horror film about signing away your soul for a hit, made by a young director who was, at that moment, trying to figure out whether he could survive Hollywood without doing exactly that.

What it is descended from, and what descends from it

The collector’s map here is unusually rich. Backwards, Phantom reaches to the 1925 Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera (the unmasking, the chandelier of the soul), to Faust in every version from Marlowe to Murnau, and to the German-expressionist idea that architecture and shadow can carry a character’s damnation. Forwards, its influence is everywhere the mainstream refuses to admit: The Rocky Horror Picture Show arrived the very next year and swallowed the midnight-movie audience whole, and the entire lineage of glam-horror opera — the maximalist, sequinned, doomed rock spectacle — runs through this film.

If you want its true modern kin, look to the operatic grief-machines the desk keeps returning to. The synth-drowned, ritual-scored despair of Panos Cosmatos and Nicolas Cage’s Mandy is Phantom’s emotional grandchild — the artist-lover destroyed by a preening cult of a man, avenged in a wash of coloured light. And for pure camp-as-sincerity, the queenly excess of the 1980 Flash Gordon shares Phantom’s conviction that a thing can be gaudy and heartfelt at once. The colour-as-weapon strand connects it straight to Argento’s Suspiria — which, not coincidentally, made a star of the same Jessica Harper three years later.

The verdict

Phantom of the Paradise is the most emotionally serious silly film I know, and the most stylistically dazzling sad one. It is where De Palma proved he could weld Hitchcock’s grammar to pop culture’s bloodstream, years before Carrie made him bankable and Blow Out made him great. Its flaws are real — the pacing lurches, the plot machinery groans, some of the comedy is broader than the tragedy can carry — and none of them matter next to the film’s core discovery, which is that a rock opera about the death of the artist can be both a joke and a wound.

Seek out the good transfer; the Arrow release restores the colour the old prints muddied. Then watch Beef die under the neon and tell me the film is only having fun.

Spoilers below

The bargain is the horror. Swan’s secret, revealed late, is that decades earlier he made his own pact — a deal with the devil, recorded on videotape (a genuinely prophetic touch for 1974, this idea that the recording is the soul) — trading his aging for eternal youth. The portrait-in-the-attic mechanism is literalised as a hidden vault of film reels: as long as the tape of Swan’s contract survives, he cannot age or die, and neither can Winslow, whose own blood-signed contract binds him to Swan’s fate.

The finale stages all of it on live television. Swan plans to marry Phoenix on air during the Paradise’s grand opening and to have her assassinated at the altar for maximum spectacle and ratings — the ultimate expression of the film’s thesis that the industry will kill its own for a broadcast. Winslow uncovers the vault and destroys the reels, breaking the spell; Swan begins to age and rot in real time in front of the horrified crowd, who take it all for staged theatre and cheer. Winslow, dying because their contracts are joined, stabs Swan, and the two of them collapse together on the stage as the audience keeps applauding, unable to tell atrocity from entertainment.

That last image is the film’s real subject arriving in full: a crowd so conditioned to spectacle that a double death reads as the best number of the night. Phoenix cradles the unmasked, dying Winslow while the mob films and screams for more. De Palma spent the decade obsessed with the camera as an instrument of violence and voyeurism, and here, at the start, he already had the thesis whole — the show does not just consume the artist, it teaches the audience to enjoy the consuming. The glam glitter was never a contradiction of the horror. It was the anaesthetic that let the horror go down smiling.