1:17:02
In Freudian terms, basements
evoke all the hidden impulses
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and sexual secrets of the soul,
usually female-specific,
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with staircase as a male-gender image.
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In religious and dramatic terms,
the basement is the lower depths, the pit,
1:17:16
the abode of Lucifer.
1:17:17
Leroux's original choice
of Gounod's opera, Faust,
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as the opera to counterpoint his tale,
was no accident,
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with Mephistopheles bursting up to the
stage in clouds of smoke from the depths
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to Marguerite,
ascending on wings to her heaven.
1:17:33
In a longer speech-trimmed,
in the original shooting script -
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the phantom tells Christine
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"I came here when my face was on fire
and I was racked with pain."
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"I found coolness in that dark water,
comfort in the blackness over it."
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"Then I heard you sing. I thought
I had died and you had come to me."
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"Then the others sang
and destroyed my heaven."
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"So I destroyed them."
1:18:05
These are very charged images
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that the Universal horror film,
probably intuitively, adopted for its own.
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Frankenstein's laboratory, with its secret
dungeons, is one huge, hidden hell.
1:18:17
The lower vaults of Castle Dracula, with
their living-dead psychosexual impulses.
1:18:21
And Carfax Abbey cellar, from which
the salvaged lovers ascend a staircase
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into a stream of sunlight
at the story's end.
1:18:30
Son of Frankenstein invokes
the literal burning pit,
1:18:33
with its sulphurous brimstone.
1:18:35
In Son of Dracula, Count Alucard rises
from the black depths of a slimy bog.
1:18:41
In The Black Cat, a satanic mass
is conducted below stairs. And so on.
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The archetypal flow of Leroux's narrative
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made for the most logical and satisfying
deployment of these elements.
1:18:54
Lubin and his writers were smart men
who observed the rituals,
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and fashioned them
within conventional narrative.