So I have very specific memories of watching the trailer for The Phantom of the Opera and getting goosebumps when that chord drops in and the footlights go up.
#THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA 2004 FACTS MOVIE#
Official filmed releases of musicals were very important to me (I took my high school theater troupe to see a screening of RENT on Broadway), but actual movie musicals were the Holy Grail. I once came across a translated libretto for Der Glöckner von Notre Dame (the musical version of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which ran in Germany for three years in the early aughts, but never got past the tryout stage Stateside last year) as a kiddo and practically fainted. It will surprise none of you that I am more attached to a musical’s book than its soundtrack, which my overactive imagination could easily populate with my own production values. I am a recovering theater kid, and I spent a lot of time and energy as a teenager gnashing my teeth over just how inaccessible musicals were to me. Of course, there’s a Phantom in the sewers of Paris rather than in the attic, but both looming threats are surprisingly seductive. Beautiful, crumbling architecture, death looming in the shadows, young love, beautiful young women rising above their stations, gorgeous costumes, and brooding. I mean, let’s face it: The Phantom of the Opera boasts a lot of similar elements as Crimson Peak. In 2004, back when I was a young preteen full of unspeakable urges (queer ones, not Byronic hero urges-well, not those Byronic hero urges), it was The Phantom of the Opera that captured the bloody hearts of the preteen Romantic hordes. All of this delighted sighing over romance and stylized frights brought me back to my own adolescence. I’ve seen (and, of course, promptly misplaced) tumblr commentary indicating that this was exactly what they yearned for as preteens when their mainstream and more current peers were focused elsewhere. Crimson Peak’s box office may not be what Universal wanted, but I have been having a ball seeing it hit home with its intended audience: gothically and/or Romantically inclined women of all ages.