Phantom of the Paradise (Harbor Productions, Pressman-Williams Enterprises, 20th Century-Fox, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the next film after the 1979 Dracula on Turner Classic Movies’ 2026 Hallowe’en marathon was considerably better: Phantom of the Paradise (1974), written and directed by Brian De Palma and obviously a rehash/spoof of The Phantom of the Opera set in the world of rock music. The principal villain is Swan (Paul Williams, who was at the height of his 15 minutes in the mid-1970’s and wrote and produced the music for the film as well as playing a major role on screen), a teen idol from 1953 who made a deal with the Devil that he would never age visibly. The deal was recorded on a videotape (though an imdb.com “Goofs” poster noted that color videotape didn’t exist in 1953) on which, The Picture of Dorian Gray-style, Swan’s image would age over the years while the live person would not. We don’t learn Swan’s sinister backstory until well past the halfway point of the film. Instead we meet Winslow Leach (William Finley), a nerdish young composer who’s just written a rock cantata based on the Faust legend. Swan hears this music and decides it’s the perfect piece to open the Paradise, a palatial ballroom he wants to open as the ultimate rock-concert venue. Of course, being a music-industry slimeball with an even slimier business partner, Arnold Philbin (George Memmoli), Swan also takes credit for Leach’s score and puts his own name on it as composer (a plot twist also used in the 1943 and 1962 films of The Phantom of the Opera and in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1996 musical, though not in Gaston Leroux’s original 1910 novel or the first – and still the best – film version, made in 1925 with Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgwick and Lon Chaney as directors and Chaney as star). Swan and his henchmen try to get rid of Winslow by framing him on drug charges; he’s given a life sentence at Sing Sing and forced into an experiment in which all his teeth are removed and replaced by metal ones. He escapes (absurdly easily) only to be caught in a record press at Swan’s “Death Records” label, which is pressing copies of Swan’s version of Winslow’s Faust cantata. The press wrecks his vocal cords and permanently scars the right side of his face, forcing him to don a metal mask and haunt the Paradise as its mysterious “Phantom.”

Winslow is also in unrequited love with Phoenix (Jessica Harper, making her film debut and giving an “Introducing” credit), whom he heard auditioning for Swan at his palatial mansion (where Swan was entertaining multiple women in a circular bed). Winslow sneaked into the mansion in the first place by dressing in drag, which he was wearing when the cops busted him on the phony drug charge. Once he’s on the loose and haunting the Paradise, Winslow decides that only Phoenix will be allowed to sing his Faust cantata. When Swan assigns the lead role to a man, Beef (Gerrit Graham, voice-doubled by Ray Kennedy), Winslow sneaks into the bathroom where Beef is showering and … well, it wouldn’t be a Brian De Palma movie without an Alfred Hitchcock allusion somewhere, would it? In fact Beef survives his encounter with Winslow in the shower (earlier Swan had sealed Winslow in a brick-walled room à la Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, but once again Winslow managed to escape), only to get electrocuted on stage by a prop lightning bolt Winslow wielded. Ultimately Swan seduces Phoenix and gets her to agree to marry him in exchange for the lead role in Faust, only he really has hired an assassin to kill her on stage because her premature death will send her posthumous record sales soaring. (It’s a gimmick that’s “planted” in the film’s first song, “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye,” by Swan’s 1950’s retro group “The Juicy Fruits,” about a rock star named Eddie who committed suicide because his death would increase his record sales so much it would generate the money needed for his sister to have a life-saving super-operation.) Earlier in the story Winslow had tried to commit suicide himself, only to be told by Swan that he wouldn’t be allowed to do that because the contract he’d signed to sell his soul to the Devil wouldn’t allow him to exit the earth ahead of schedule. Instead he leaves a gaping wound in his chest and Swan tells him that if Winslow tries to kill Swan, his wound will open up and they’ll both die. Winslow manages to save Phoenix from the assassin’s bullet ¬– Arnold Philbin gets shot and killed instead – and he also destroys Swan’s videotape collection, ensuring that they both die but not before Swan’s face ages all at once, repelling Phoenix.

Phantom of the Paradise also contains a sequence that eerily anticipates the similar scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, filmed a year later (though the stage version, The Rocky Horror Show, had premiered in 1972 and so it’s unclear who influenced whom), in which Beef appears as a Frankenstein-style monster created (as in the Hammer Frankenstein films in the 1950’s but not Universal’s originals from the 1930’s) in a bathtub. As his creation is being prepared the cast (Jeffrey Comanor, Archie Hahn, and Harold Oblong, who appear successively as Swan’s various bands, the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums – for a quite funny Beach Boys parody called “Upholstery” in which the main aria from Winslow’s Faust cantata is turned into a car song – and “The Undeads”) sing a song called “Somebody Super Like You.” When he finally emerges from the nurturing vat Beef sings “Life at Last” (whose second line is “Salutations from the other side”) until he’s offed by Winslow’s lightning bolt. I first heard the soundtrack album of Phantom of the Paradise well before I got to see the movie; my then-girlfriend Cat had been a huge fan of the film and had bought the album. I was quite impressed with the quality of the music and the sheer cheekiness of the concept, and we first got to see the film together in 1980 when it was being revived for a midnight screening in Pacific Beach. Indeed, that was where Phantom of the Paradise lived for years, though it never developed the fanatic following that The Rocky Horror Picture Show did.

For years I had thought Phantom of the Paradise was Brian De Palma’s first feature; it wasn’t – indeed, he already had the strange and beautiful horror film Sisters under his belt when he shot this. But it’s a film I really like and one which holds up surprisingly well. Incidentally, after the screening Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz said that Phantom of the Paradise ran into legal trouble not only from the source you’d expect – Universal, which still owned the movie rights to The Phantom of the Opera – but from one you wouldn’t: the British superstar rock band Led Zeppelin. It seems that though Swan’s record label in the film is “Death Records” (anticipating the real “Death Row Records,” a rap label founded in the 1990’s which was essentially a racket run by one faction of the Bloods street gang; it “broke” such “artists” as Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg before meeting its blessed demise in 2002, though Snoop Dogg bought the remnants of it and tried to revive it 20 years later), its parent company is called “Swan Song Productions.” At the time the film was released, Led Zeppelin had just founded their own record label and had named it “Swan Song Records.” Led Zeppelin sued 20th Century-Fox over the name, and the settlement required the studio to blur out just about every appearance of the name “Swan Song Productions” in the film. According to Mankiewicz, Brian De Palma is still upset about this, and more than once he’s expressed the wish, “Can’t someone take those ugly mattes off my film?”