Skeletal with bulging eyes, a receded nose, jutting teeth, and thin, stringy hair and an expression which swings from misery to demonic rage, Chaney’s visual interpretation of Erik is en pointe, even if the plot portrays him as an unredeemable fiend. The film’s most noteworthy feature, the makeup was designed by Chaney himself and was – like Karloff’s in “Frankenstein” – a secret until the film was released. Chaney’s famous makeup has continued to be unsurpassed in its depiction of Erik’s skullish deformity, and may have been designed to resemble actual sufferers of porphyria. – an adaptation which, despite being almost a century old, remains the most accurate of any interpretation. The first was the silent film starring Lon Chaney Sr. And then, one after the other, there came a series of incidents so curious and so inexplicable that the very shrewdest people began to feel uneasy.LON CHANEY SR. Sensible men who had wind of the story began by saying that Joseph Buquet had been the victim of a joke played by one of his assistants.

His words were received with interest and amazement and soon there were other people to say that they too had met a man in dress-clothes with a death's head on his shoulders. This chief scene-shifter was a serious, sober, steady man, very slow at imagining things. All the hair he has is three or four long dark locks on his forehead and behind his ears.' His nose is so little worth talking about that you can't see it side-face and THE ABSENCE of that nose is a horrible thing TO LOOK AT. His skin, which is stretched across his bones like a drumhead, is not white, but a nasty yellow. You just see two big black holes, as in a dead man's skull. His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils.

Phantom of the opera book deformity