I was watching the silent Lon Chaney version of "The Phantom of the Opera" earlier on TCM, and I began to do some pondering about the many Phantom movies.

When someone thinks of The Phantom of the Opera, often there are two iconic images that will come to mind. One is the famous unmasking of Lon Chaney, rightfully recognized as one of the very iconic images of not only horror, but of cinema itself. His face makeup is taken from the original novel's description of Erik, as someone with a horrible deformity from birth that gives him a terrifying corpse-like appearance.

The second iconic image is one of a man wearing a white mask that covers only part of his face, with the part of the face that is still showing looking perfectly normal. This has nothing to do with Leroux's original novel. Rather, this originates from the 1943 film version starring Claude Rains as the Phantom, the first American film version since Chaney's. In this film, it is said that Erique (this film's spelling of the name) was a gifted musician and a normal man, until he was scarred with acid, at which point he lost his sanity and began hiding out in the opera house. The story of this version in general has been changed drastically from the novel, and bears little resemblance to Leroux's story.

But curiously, no matter what other changes to the story are made, it is this 1943 film's backstory which has become the norm for all other film versions. In a list of the major adaptations of the novel, every single one, save for the Chaney version, has this new disfigurement as its foundation (although if there is another film version that used the original plot of Erik being deformed from birth then please tell me, I would love to know!). Why has this new version of the story taken precedence over the original? I suspect due to makeup difficulties - after all, we can't all be makeup geniuses like Lon Chaney, and the effects of facial scars and half-masks were much easier to do.

And although the story of a normal man who becomes disfigured does have its own interest and appeal, I would love to see a modern film version that uses the original premise, of a man disfigured from birth to look like a corpse. Sadly, I have a couple of reasons to believe that this will not happen.

The first has to do with the makeup that would be involved. Even today, the makeup device that was used by Lon Chaney is astounding, using techniques such as pushing his eyeballs forward from their sockets with wires and reshaping and pinning his nose to give it a corpse appearance. But most actors today aren't as enthused with elaborate makeup as Lon Chaney was, and most of them would sadly not even consider doing this. This would only leave the option of the Phantom having to be computer-generated, a la Davy Jones in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies -- and I think most of us can agree that a CGI Phantom would just be wrong.

Also, there is the general mentality and shortcomings of Hollywood that prevents them from doing this. The original novel was a mix of horror, tragedy, and romance, but few film versions have been able to get this balance. Mostly we seem to get either dramas that concentrate on the tragedy and romance and pay far too little attention to the horror (such as the 1943 version previously mentioned) or we get full-on horror movies that make Erik completely unsympathetic and are more concerned with shocks than anything else (witness the 1989 version in which Erik is turned into a pseudo-Leatherface who makes masks from the faces of his victims). And sadly I have the feeling that were they to give Erik the appearance of an actual monster, rather than a mostly normal man with some scarring, they would tend towards the latter.

Which is a shame, because that original version of Erik has a story that is all at once thrilling, romantic, and heartbreaking. But alas, in this day of movies like "Saw" entering into their sixty-third or so sequel, it's a safe bet that Hollywood would not choose to pay attention to this story.