The PHRANCHISE of the OPERA (1989 - 1999)

The Phranchise of the Opera:
In which I throw flowers on stage for an under-seen horror franchise

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, MovieJawn Podcast Czar

In 1989 director Dwight H. Little (whose Halloween 4 was released the previous year) unleashed a then-new version of The Phantom of the Opera on the world. Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, it stars Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) as Victorian composer Eric Destler, and Jill Schoelen (Popcorn, The Stepfather) as modern-day aspiring opera singer Christine. When Christine uncovers the notation for Destler’s composition Don Juan Triumphant as well as rumors of his involvement in many deaths and disappearances, she still decides to perform the piece for an audition and is subsequently knocked unconscious and awakens in 1885. After surviving numerous attempts on her life and well-being by Destler, and simultaneously pursuing an opera career in 1885, Christine returns to her own time believing Destler is dead, only to find that he has survived for a century due to a deal with the devil, and is now the producer of her opera, Mr. Foster. Christine steals his copy of Don Juan Triumphant, stabs Foster, and flees into the night.

Phantom ‘89 didn’t reinvent the horror wheel but it did enough things right that it spawned a seemingly little-known franchise spanning seven DTV (direct to video) sequels - eight total films in just ten years! - that rivals the highs and lows of horror franchises of the era, like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Hellraiser. It also perfectly encapsulates where franchise horror was in the years between the boom of the 1980s and its resurrection following Scream in 1996. For better or worse.

The filmography is as follows:
The Phantom of the Opera (1989)  - dir. Dwight H. Little
The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror of Manhattan (1990) - dir. Peter Lyons Collister
The Phantom of the Opera 3: Miseria Cantare (1991) - dir. Kinka Usher
The Phantom of the Opera 4: Nocturne (1994) - dir. Marc Forster
The Phantom of the Opera 5: O, Discordia (a.k.a Fear of Sound) (1996) - dir. Dick Bachmann
The Phantom of the Opera 6: The Last Canticle (1997) - dir. Risa Bramon Garcia
The Phantom of the Opera 7: Cacophony (1998) - dir. Alejandro Amenábar
The Phantom of the Opera 8: Epoch Dirge (1999) - Tony Trov, Johnny Zito

I won’t go into extensive detail about all of them, but there are some areas of the Phranchise of the Opera (as I think of it) which are absolutely worth noting. First of all, the films’ various directors are an interesting bunch. Horror has, and was especially in this era, a proving ground for aspiring filmmakers and the assorted Phantoms’ directors went on to direct a very diverse crop of films including Mystery Men (1999 - Usher), Monster’s Ball (2001 - Forster), The Others (2001 - Amenábar, who had directed Abre Los Ojos in ‘97), Alpha Girls (2013 - Trov, Zito), and 200 Cigarettes (Garcia). The only outliers are Peter Lyons Collister - Dwight H. Little’s cinematographer on Halloween 4, and the original Phantom ‘89 - who has a long cinematography career but never returned to directing, and Bachmann who just kind of vanished?

Likewise, horror tends to have a high turnover of new, relatively unknown talent. Before Scream became the phenomenon that it would eventually become, horror (especially of the franchise kind) was of a low enough priority that casting well-knowns wasn’t seen as very important which combined with the generally high character turnover rate, meant that most sequels featured less than 3 returning characters - though there are exceptions. Phantom ‘89’s original final girl Jill Schoelen only shows up in three of the sequels, while Englund bats a thousand appearing in all eight films in the Phranchise! Molly Shannon, who had a small supporting role in the original, actually reappears in The Last Canticle (1997) with no direct mention of the events of the original film. Other notable cast members appearing across the sequels include Christina Ricci (Wednesday from the ‘90s Addams Family movies), Jane Weidlin (Clue, The Go-Gos), Calvert DeForest (Larry Bud Melman from The Late Show with David Letterman), Mos Def (Monster’s Ball), Jennifer Rubin (Taryn from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), Pat Maztroianni (Degrassi franchise), Gabrielle Union (Bring It On), Taran Noah Smith (the youngest brother from Home Improvement) Lee Pace (recently of Bodies Bodies Bodies - more on him later), and weirdest of all given his eventual popularity, an uncredited, dialogue-less appearance from Philip Seymour Hoffman (Twister).

The plots of the sequels were at the best of times what you might call “loosely connected” by the concept of Destler’s music as a destructive force. In the finale of Phantom ‘89, after wounding Destler, Christine passes a street violinist who begins playing Don Juan Triumphant. Terror of Manhattan runs with this idea, with Christine hearing the song everywhere she goes. Haunted by this music, she can’t sleep, and seems to have lost her mind, claiming to have visions of Destler taunting her, narrowly avoiding being committed to an asylum. In further installments, the music is shown to be alternately hypnotic (Nocturne), to be an extension of Destler’s consciousness (Cacophony), or to induce madness in assorted forms (Miseria, Discordia, Canticle, Dirge) and in fact Miseria Cantare revealed that music was the dark art of choice of the demon Destler made his Faustian deal with in Phantom ‘89, implying that the demon was responsible for the dancing plague of 1518 as well as the frenzied phenomenon of Lisztomania. 

When the horror monsters popular throughout the 1980’s reached the 1990’s, things got very weird. The Hellraiser films touched on demonic construction and architecture, The Leprechaun went from space to the hood, Michael Myers was revealed to be the puppet for the druidic Cult of Thorn, and Jason Voorhees, after battling a stand in for Carrie, somehow takes a boat from a lake to NY harbor, and then goes to Hell. It’s a real “IYKYK” situation and describing 1990’s horror to people who don’t can sometimes seem like you’re just making the whole thing up. The Pharanchise of the Opera is no exception. Changing locations from New York to Philadelphia with little explanation (Miseria), not to mention the summer camp in the fictional town of Caramel Hill (Canticle, which filmed in New Jersey, but Caramel Hill’s location is never given), or the sensory deprivation tank-inspired feature length flashback to Destler and Jack the Ripper (Discordia), as well as the shifting tone of the flicks, and the changing effects of Don Juan Triumphant all come out of left field for first-time viewers.

In The Last Canticle, the counselors of a summer music camp (one played by the returning Molly Shannon) teach the children’s choir to sing DJT which somehow doesn’t affect anyone at the camp, but drives the residents of the nearby small town insane turning this sixth film - marketed as the supposed final installment - into a kind of redneck zombie film in which Destler ultimately almost becomes an antihero, sacrificing himself to Hell in the final moments.

The following film, 1998’s Cacophony dips the deepest into Horror/Comedy, opening with Destler in Hell, introducing other spirits who had fallen prey to the demon including ones seemingly based on the original Universal Studios versions of the Phantom of the Opera (1925, 1943), a disfigured ‘70s rock star - seemingly an allusion to Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974), one that appears to be a reference to Fantômas (the silent film criminal character created in 1911) and Jack the Ripper. They all follow when Destler manages to escape from Hell and he spends the film tracking them down and returning them to Hell with the assistance of a 1998 Lee Pace. The relatively recent rediscovery of noted babe Pace in this bonkers film has even led to a few versions of the popular “Spider-Men pointing” meme.

The last film in the Phranchise, 1999’s Epoch Dirge has had a similar grassroots rediscovery-via-meme. Released on the eve of the new millennium, the film’s plot is a bubbling cauldron of Y2K-fearing hacker clichés where the climax sees the heroes (including Jennifer Rubin) fail to prevent a mass destructive upload that, among other effects sees satellites somehow blasting Don Juan Triumphant at midnight around the globe - the final moments show the astronauts aboard a Mir station stand-in sabotaging the station and steering it towards North America before cutting to black. The series ended on this potential cliffhanger, but the film’s real legacy is the memetic reappropriation via .gif of a particular line of dialogue, similar to Silent Night, Deadly Night 2’s (1987) “Garbage day!” line. In Dirge’s case, a gruff-voiced computer tech (often erroneously identified as Michael Chiklis) says the line “Tha innernet. It’s tha wave of tha future!”

Hilarious as that may be (and it is), the true draw, and what should rightfully be the lasting legacy of the series, is the monster, Eric Destler himself. Robert Englund gradually leans into camp as the Phranchise continues, and by the time he’s in a weird buddy-cop type movie hunting down escaped killers (Cacophony), the series had taken on a tone almost like the Batman series from 1966 but made through a Paul Greengrass-esque lens. The makeup for the Destler Phantom also evolved over time. In the ‘89 Phantom, he looked, well, kinda like Freddy Krueger. It’s hard to say whether this is exacerbated by it being Englund under the makeup or not. But Destler’s version of the traditional Phantom of the Opera mask is one made of human skin, which lends the whole thing a different dimension. Any time the series is flashing back to Destler’s era of 1885, he has this kind of Hannibal Lecter-meets-Leatherface disguise that’s constantly rotting and falling apart. It’s gruesome and wonderful. In his future (1989 and on) he has access to these synthetic appliances; essentially Darkman style false faces. They mostly all resemble Englund/Destler throughout the series, with the exception of one nightmare in Nocturne where the final girl caresses her boyfriend’s face only for her fingers to go right through the skin to Destler’s face underneath, and a gag in Cacophony - again, the most madcap in the series - where he briefly disguises himself as a cop. 

Also, notably for a horror franchise of the era, Destler is mostly just A Guy. He’s never explicitly shown to have supernatural abilities, though you could argue his resilience to bodily harm and instances of nearly superhuman strength might qualify, it’s left fairly open ended, à la Halloween’s Michael Myers (pre Curse of Michael Myers in 1995 with the overtly supernatural Mark of Thorn). Aside from Destler’s implied nearly inexhaustible fortune (the result of his long life? Or possibly another stipulation in his demonic deal?), he has no notable special abilities. He’s essentially a psychopathic Batman.

The logic, plot, and continuity of the Phantom of the Opera's ‘90s Phranchise is tangled and inconsistent, but not any worse than its theoretical shelf-mates like Hellraiser, Friday the 13th, the aforementioned Halloween, or Leprechaun, among many others. As we keep seeing these more well-known franchises getting spotlighted with relaunches, reimaginings, or long-gap sequels, I keep waiting for the moment that light shines on the Phantom. Presumably some version of the Phantom character would have ended up in Universal’s Dark Universe, had that succeeded. But it didn’t, so let’s get weird and musical! I think the Phantom of the Opera (1989) has earned an encore.

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Disclaimer:
The preceding article, save the opening paragraph, is entirely a falsehood. While there was a Phantom of the Opera made in 1989 and it is as described, it spawned no sequels despite being actually quite good. This article was written as a thought experiment and celebration of both the kitchen-sink approach to ‘90s horror franchises, as well as a monster, character, and performance I feel has been woefully overlooked.

After first viewing Phantom ‘89, I could not believe it hadn’t caught on and in considering what the ensuing films might have looked like, I conceived the rough approximation of a franchise described above. Would that we all had lived in that world. I hope you enjoyed it, that it may have ignited some creative spark in you, and that you’re not too mad at being ever-so-briefly deceived.

It should be mentioned that a sequel was proposed, but never made and eventually became the film Dance Macabre (1992), also starring Robert Englund.

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