"Man's Hatred Has Made Me So"

Freakification and the Shifting Gaze in The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Abstract

By using artistic conventions only available
through cinema, The Phantom of the Opera (1925) manipulates the gaze to create a character so inhuman and unsympathetic, he transcends the position of the freak into the realm of the monster. The silent horror version of this film extends the social construct of the freak into cinema so that, while the freak shows may have been closing their doors, the legacy of the freak lived on.