YMMV / Phantom of the Paradise

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Phoenix really an Ingenue who gets corrupted by Swan, or is she a savvy manipulator who employs Ping Pong Naïveté when it's convenient? You can make a case that we're seeing the story through Winslow's eyes and he has an overly-idealized view of her.
• Award Snub: Got an Oscar nomination for Best Song Score, but lost to that classic musical The Great Gatsby.
• Awesome Music: Practically every song. It's borderline Villain Song: The Musical.
• Catharsis Factor: Just try not to cheer when Swan realizes he's fucked and Winslow is responsible. The way he frantically screams Winslow's name, the high pitched screams of pain and terror he gives as Winslow finishes him off as he realizes there is nothing he can do to save his life or his soul? After everything he's done, it's hard not to appreciate it.
• Complete Monster: Mister Swan is the CEO of Death Records, owner of the Paradise Theatre, and secretly a vain, murderous devil-worshipper. Having attempted to kill himself in his youth due to fearing losing his good looks with age, Swan instead made a Deal with the Devil for immortality and eternal youth, and over time became the most powerful and vicious executive in the music industry, performing such actions as forcing female candidates to sleep with him or his right-hand man; deliberately getting his acts addicted to drugs to reduce the chances of them speaking out against him; and ending the careers of any who try anyway. When Swan steals the music of brilliant young composer Winslow Leach, he has Winslow brutalized and sent to prison on trumped up charges to silence him, where he and other inmates are subjected to unethical medical experiments sponsored by Swan. When Winslow escapes and begins terrorizing the Paradise as the eponymous Phantom, Swan tricks him into selling his own soul to the Devil on the condition that only Phoenix, Winslow's Love Interest, can sing his music. When Phoenix becomes a hit, Swan proposes marriage to her, then attempts to have her killed during the wedding for publicity. When this fails and Winslow terminates his deal with the Devil, Swan's last action before Winslow kills him is to attempt to personally strangle Phoenix to death.
• Cult Classic: While it gained a core of admirers in its initial release, factors like the later success of Brian De Palma as a director, the cult phenomenon of the similar and contemporaneous Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the attention Jessica Harper got for her role in Suspiria helped keep it in the spotlight. Danny Peary gave it a featured slot in Cult Movies 2 in 1983.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Many fans of the film find Beef the most fun character to watch.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Oddly, there seems to be a bit of this between Beef and Philbin.
  • And Winslow and Swan.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • One of more amazing examples of this. While the film only did extremely modest business in the rest of North America, it became a massive cult phenomenon in Winnipeg, Manitoba, playing for 21 straight weeks in its original run. A "Phantompalooza" convention was even organized in the city. A documentary about the whole craze, The Phantom of Winnipeg, debuted in 2019.
  • It also proved to be a hit in France, where they appreciated the homage to Gaston Leroux's work.
  • Also a huge hit in El Salvador, with "Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye" even topping the pop charts there.
  • The film was also popular in Japan and the aesthetic was highly influential for numerous Japanese works, most notably with Apocalymon and Beelzemon in Digimon, Purple Haze in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Griffith's "Femto" garb in Berserk. The Trigun manga also has a page where Knives wears a similar getup and pointy mask and plays the piano as a possible homage to the film. Even back in the late 1970s, the film's influence in Japan can be observed in The Mystery of Mamo from the "Red Jacket" era of Lupin III, whose eponymous antagonist is based on Swan both visually and in his character motivation to attain immortality due to his massive ego.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Swan is a "boy genius" record producer with a fierce ego and a willingness to kill. Probably seemed funnier before Lana Clarkson's murder. It could've been even worse if they hadn't changed the name of the character from early scripts; Swan was initially meant to be called "Spectre". (Given that Spector's instability was well-established amongst the recording industry at that point, it was most likely intended as a Take That!.)
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Swan programming Winslow a new voice almost becomes funny in an era full of auto-tune and heavily processed vocals that sound synthetic.
    • Becomes even funnier after Superman: Red Son, in which Paul Williams voices Brainiac with a digitized voice that sounds similar to the voice Swan gives to Winslow.
    • Even more so with technology nowadays, as there are software companies working on "deep faking" voices to recreate a person's voice from audio clips.
  • Winslow's spherical owl mask and black leather suit & cape seem uncannily reminiscent of Griffith's outfit over 20 years later. (Seems likely that Griffith is a Shout-Out.)
  • The Flobots vs Logan Paul controversy plays out almost exactly like the first act of the film, with a mega-producer taking a lyrically and musically sophisticated piece by a little-known artist and reworking it into a bland pop song.
  • With the coincidental similarity of The Undead to KISS, the fact that KISS went on to star in their own modernization of The Phantom of the Opera.
  • Speaking of the Undead, while Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical wouldn't exist for years, "Somebody Super Like You" is uncannily like a musical parody of its title song, from the very similar riff, to the over-the-top lyrics about a compelling man with perfect pitch, to the multiple-key-change cadenza at the end (complete with incredibly high-pitched scream by Beef at the end). You almost wonder if ALW heard it and subconsciously had it in mind.
  • This film's cinematographer, Larry Pizer, later worked on Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare and a 1983 TV movie version of The Phantom of the Opera.
  • Another connection between this film and DC Comics; Paul Williams plays Swan, a sleazy bird-themed villain who's the owner of a glitzy entertainment establishment. Years later, in a DC product, he'd play another sleazy bird-themed villain who's the owner of a glitzy restaurant. The fact that POTP's story could be easily translated into a typical Batman villain's origin story makes the connection all the more amusing.
  • Pheonix's actress, Jessica Harper, later retired from acting and now has a successful career...as a singer.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Even before his Phantomization Winslow comes across as kind of a dick. He chokes out Philbin for merely suggesting that the Juicy Fruits perform some of his music, and seems more concerned about whether Phoenix told Swan he was at the auditions rather than the fact that she was just sexually assaulted. Of course, none of this justifies what happens to him throughout the film.
  • Beef is treated badly by just about everyone, and his only real crimes were being tacky and rude, and being strongarmed by Philbin out of quitting the show. The song The Hell of It was intended to be played over a scene of Beef's funeral, implying that this was supposed to be about him.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Swan retroactively crosses it when he makes his Deal with the Devil. In Winslow's eyes, he crosses it when he sleeps with Phoenix out of pettiness to make Winslow attempt suicide- only to realize due to the deal- he can't die- adding another layer of spite.
  • For the first hour of the movie anything Winslow did was at least understandable. But when Phoenix's performance is about to start he murders the totally innocent stagehand operating the spotlight so he can man it— and he murders Beef for no better reason than he was in the wrong place at the wrong time— showing how far he has gone in his anger and obsession.
• No Yay: The love scene between Phoenix and Swan. He doesn't even take his glasses off! Winslow seems to think so, too.
• Older Than They Think: A Reference Overdosed homage to an older style of filmmaking, including the Wipe used as a transition, with an overt tone of Melodrama. It's about a young man full of promise who, after experiencing betrayal and injury, becomes a villain who wears a masked headpiece and a black cape. We get to hear his disturbing breathing, and he gets fitted with a special voice box. Hmmm. Keep in mind, Brian De Palma and George Lucas are friends (and De Palma famously script-doctored the Opening Crawl of A New Hope). At the very least, the two were both clearly on the same conceptual page around the same time.
• Questionable Casting: Having the diminutive and cherubic Paul Williams as Swan is certainly unexpected casting. Whether it undermines the sinister menace the character is supposed to have or gives him the compelling subtext of being A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing is an ongoing debate among people who've seen the film.
• Retroactive Recognition: For the Whose Line? fans, there's Archie Hahn as one of The Juicy Fruits. In fact, it's a little strange watching him in this film, and actually sing really well, while on Whose Line?, he... well.... didn't.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The "unmasked" Winslow at the end looks like it's made out of Plasticine.
  • The various attempts to cover up/replace instances of "Swan Song" are painfully obvious in some places.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Despite being a loose adaptation of Phantom of the Opera, Lindsay Ellis called this "the only good" movie adaptation.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • As a parody of The Beach Boys, "Upholstery" opens with a blatant soundalike of the "California Girls" keyboard riff.
  • "Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye" in places sounds similar to Elton John's "Crocodile Rock", and is also an extended musical nod to the Doo Wop standard "Little Darlin' ".
• Too Cool to Live: Beef! Winslow by the end too...
• Values Resonance: The concept of an evil entertainment mogul who is untouchable by the law and controls everyone around him through a combination of blackmail, bribery, sexual harassment, and drugs seems just as relevant in the era of the Me Too Movement as it did in the '70s.^note Specifically, Swan now seems similar to Harvey Weinstein. Brian De Palma himself may have even picked up on this too, since he said in a 2018 interview that he was working on a script about a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Weinstein
• Vindicated by History: The film had lackluster box office returns and tepid reviews when it originally came out, with it only being successful in Winnipeg and Paris. Nowadays, it's seen far more positively as an interesting Cult Classic, with famous directors like Guillermo del Toro and Edgar Wright admitting to being big fans of it, and even Daft Punk admitting to meeting each other through their shared love of the movie.
• The Woobie:
  • "The Juicy Fruits"; they're treated pretty badly throughout the film.
  • Phoenix anyone? A sweet if a bit naive hopeful singer, gets sexually assaulted during her, ahem audition and then she finds out the one person who seemed to believe in her (and arguably the only character who actually seems to care about her at all) has (apparantly) died. Things improve for her a bit when she get's her big break but this is only after Swan sidelines her and Beef is horribly killed on stage! When she does get the spotlight she dreamed of Swan wastes no time taking advantage of her i.e drugging her, controlling her manipulating her into unknowingly signing her voice to him and organizing her execution! By the end of the film she's left devastated and confused when her fiance who's face is melting tries to strangle her, luckily she is saved by Winslow only for him to die in front of her and no one noticing or caring as she cries over his body! Break the Cutie indeed!

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