As much as I love Freddy, I’ve always been partial to your 1989 version of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. What differentiates your Phantom from the others?

The first thing that should be said is what people tend to forget, because of the great success of the Andrew Lloyd Weber/Michael Crawford association, and that is that PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is a great old horror show. It’s not all singing-all dancing. As much as I enjoyed the Broadway show and am looking forward to seeing Joel Schumacher’s film, this source material was written by Gaston Leroux, who was quite possibly the Stephen King of his generation. I might be mistaken, but I believe at one point, Leroux’s novella was the most widely translated book in the world outside of the Bible. So, at some point after the turn of the century, in the time of “Penny Dreadful” horror novellas, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, the book, before Lon Chaney’s movie, was absolutely an international success. So it was one of those first best sellers made into a movie. Then you have the Lon Chaney version, and many others including Claude Rains, Herbert Lom… It’s a role that really attracts actors. Now, what attracted me to the role of Eric, the Phantom, was a couple of things. One was I had full quality control over the make-up with Kevin Yegher, who’s obviously one of the make-up geniuses along with Dick Smith, Steve Johnson, Rick Baker and Stan Winston. I had Kevin, and he had free reign from our producers to create the look. The other thing that attracted me was the director, Dwight Little. Both Dwight and I are of another generation than you. Whereas you and your generation had that sort of latent hard-on for the great early slasher films in the late 70’s and the wonderful cult drive-in classics of slightly earlier fare, whether its TOOLBOX MURDERS or HONEYMOON KILLERS, my generation sat through the drive-ins and saw these saturated color, lush Hammer films from England, with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Herbert Lom. And they also, considering what was going on in film back then, were probably some of the most sexual films being made at the time. What Dwight Little and I wanted to do was kind of recreate that saturated, dark, lush Hammer film quality that he and I remembered as youngsters sitting in the drive-in movies with our learner’s permits in the back seats. You know, we’d be there making out with a girl, realizing that although we were halfway to second base, we’d rather watch the movie (laughs)!

I thought I was the only one more interested in the movie than the back seat at the Drive-in!

Trust me, Tim. You weren’t. I loved Hammer horror. And we wanted to recreate that with PHANTOM. So we had a lot of fun with styles. There's this whole Fellini/60’s flashback sequence with dwarves… I guess little people is the politically correct term! And we also had the film peppered with terrific English actors. The Diva is played by Stephanie Lawrence who is the original EVITA. Bill Nighy, who’s now come to such fame and is having such a great renaissance,. He just starred in LOVE ACTUALLY and SHAUN OF THE DEAD. So we really had some nice creds going for us. And we shot the film on the standing sets for the Cannon remake of THREE PENNY OPERA starring the late, great Raul Julia and Roger Daltry from The Who. So, it was just this great, fun adventure. And our idea, our concept, along with the Hammer film themes, to really give it a sort of underpinning off that “Brit Slick” horror, was to set it in “Jack the Ripper” London as opposed to Paris. So instead of it being the Opera in Paris, it was the Opera in London. That was our take on it. And I’m actually rather proud of it. Strangely enough, along with V and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, I get more response and feedback to PHANTOM than just about anything else I’ve done. There’s a huge contingent of Goth girls who really related to the kind of overblown romantic quality of the film. And also, the sort of danger element with the girl. Christine. That obsessed love. It made money when it came out. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it’s done very well on video. It does have a certain life to it. It’s interesting. It sort of filled in a niche. And I think that the younger generation that caught on to it didn’t really see the Hammer connection. I think they just responded innately to that. They kind of knew they were seeing something that was a bit retro, and a bit flashback, and they were intrigued.

It’s certainly the only “splatter” version of PHANTOM ever done. You’re right, PHANTOM is a horror story, but over the years, it became watered down. Especially the 1942 Claude Rains version which positioned the Phantom’s story second to the Christine/Raoul romance.

Claude Rains made him a violinist, and he played him a lot older. Now, the Phantom should be sympathetic, but I think you also need to do a bit of that “Grand Guignol” theatrical horror of its time. You have to understand that Paris of the time of Gaston Leroux was the Paris of “Grand Guignol”. And there’s a much more parallel to the London of Jack the Ripper with that Paris of Grand Guignol that there is to this sympathetic approach, making it ALL about the classical music. I also will be honest with you, Tim. There was a great sequel that’s never been made which was called THE PHANTOM IN MANHATTAN. A lot of elements from that script have been borrowed subsequently. I’ve seen sequences that reminded me of that script as far back as Guillermo Del Toro’s MIMIC. More recently in BLADE 2.

Okay. I know you’re dying to tell me. What was it about?

Well, the sequel took place in the buried train graveyards beneath the “Belle Époque” superstructure of the original subways that the sand hogs built many, many layers below the current subways of New York. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the urban legend of the “mole people”… You’ll see it occasionally on LAW AND ORDER or a NEW YORK CSI, but there are people that live beneath the warming grates and the subway vents of New York. There’s entire little societies down there. And in the sequel, they have me, the Phantom, having come from Europe and living down there, and composing down there in an old robber baron’s train car. And he’s served by all these homeless kids. Think “Fagin” in OLIVER TWIST. So, my children will go up and work this surface, and I would stay below, and occasionally foray into the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan. And once, while I’m going up, I hear a voice in the subway. Where the street performer’s play on the subway platform, I hear this voice. And, here’s the hitch, it’s a blind girl. The new Christine is blind. She’s Italian. Her name is Christina. Her father, think Gepetto in PINOCHHIO, even though it’s contemporary, we make him a new Italian immigrant to Am erica, perhaps Siciliano, and he accompanies her on violin, which is echoes of Claude Rains. Her voice is the perfect instrument for the opera I’m working on. Plus she’s blind, she doesn’t know what I look like. She just hears my soothing voice. So I school her and coach her. Well, she still has to play on the subways to make ends meet. Her father is killed by skinheads. I avenge her father… There you go. There you get your splatter quotient there… And then, at a decadent opera party that uses the subway trains for an opening night gala, they pull her station and they hear her singing. They discover her. She’s brought into the professional world of opera, and so my opera will never be made. Also, concurrently, they discover a physician who can correct her sight with laser surgery, so now she can see again. So now the third act is, Will the Phantom kill her? Will he kill the surgeon who restored her sight? Will he thwart her debut at the New York City Opera? Or, as it turns out, you see me sitting there in my box seat, with my face sewn together, and I listen to her perform, and that’s enough for me. And the last image is me walking down 5th Avenue in the snow with my footprints trailing. And I lift a manhole cover and go back underneath.

Wow. Can I see that movie now, please?

Exactly! And that’s what attracted me to do the film! I had a contract for a two picture deal! And that was going to be the backside. That’s why the Phantom that we did ended contemporarily in New York. So that we could bridge that. And yeah, it was a great script. Better than the first one. Phenomenal script. It had violence and sex and all of this wonderful Chaplinesque quality with the blind girl and her father. Just unfortunate that we never got that made.

Such a shame.

But that was the original attraction to both me and Dwight Little, the director. This little tiny homage to Hammer films. And that’s the way people should look at it.

Now you said you had approval over the make-up. I remember,at the time, the talk was Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund doing another masked performance. And then the film came out, and it was so cool, because, for the most part, you could actually see your face.

One of the problems was that on the poster, they air brushed the Phantom make-up so that it resembled the Freddy Krueger make-up, which it doesn’t look like at all. The conception behind the make-up that Kevin Yegher and I came up with, is, you know those little tourist trap gift shop busts of Beethoven? There’s actually tee shirts of this image sold in the back of Rolling Stone magazine. They used to wear those a lot in the late 60’s, early 70’s. That was the hip thing to wear. So we designed the make-up off of that. As if I idolized Ludwig. Old “Ludwig Van”, as Malcolm McDowell in CLOCKWORK ORANGE would say (laughs). And so, that was the concept with the hair brushed off my face. I mean, I was out there poaching bodies, like Jack the Ripper, because I needed their musculature, I needed their skin and flesh, to create this Beethoven visage that I would cover my own deformity with so that I could attend the Opera. So that I could pass on the streets.

That was always a very brilliant concept. Never done before or since.

Yeah, I thought it was kind of a great, macabre concept. Make-up over make-up. So the idea was I would look a little strange, but a little handsome and romantic. If you remember back to the late 80’s, there was still a remnant… The Goth generation had crossed over from Adam Ant and the New Romantics. In music and fashion, we tend to forget about the New Romantics who came after Glam and Punk. There was Glam. There was Punk. And then New Romantics.

Of course. Duran Duran. I was there! Still have the photos.

Well, we sort of brought a little bit of that New Romantic, Edwardian feel to our film. We wanted that look. Plus the look of Beethoven, young Beethoven. And yet, my Phantom was also very strange looking. You know, you did see the stitches. And as the day wore on, the stitches would begin to separate. The pallor would begin to yellow and jaundice. Kevin Yegher actually had this remarkable continuity chart that we followed… So when jaundice set in, it was time for me to go out and do a fresh kill and replace the skin.

Which was great story wise, because it gave the Phantom motivation to kill.

Yes. That is why he had to kill. Because he couldn’t pass in society if he looked the way he really looked. He had to come out of his subterranean lair.

Don’t think we’ll be seeing any of that in the new musical version (laughs)!

No, but the musical version does capture something quite wonderful. I mean, aside from the great gimmick of that half-mask that Lloyd Weber and the designers came up with, the play really allows for the Phantom to exploit his sexuality. But the film, because of the music, because it’s such a lush score, it does accomplish that great romantic thing that it needs. Romanticism means a lot of things. Just like melodrama means a lot of things. A lot of people consider the original FRANKENSTEIN a melodrama, not a horror film. You know, you have to play melodrama. Melodrama has to be played larger than life. It has to be true, but it has to be true in its exaggeration. Like Opera. And that’s what’s so great about PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. You can go over the top, because the music supports that. Just like you can act big in LORD OF THE RINGS, because the scenery and the CGI and what surrounds you in the frame is larger than life.

What do you think it is about the character of the Phantom, which started out as a Penny Dreadful paperback and now is a major movie musical, that continues to capture the imagination of audiences?

I think the great thing about Eric… I mean, for anybody who’s a music fan, whether its rock and roll or classical music, or even Opera, for that matter, I think the idea of his obsession with the music. And trying to get this perfect score, this perfect song. I think that’s really the initial attraction. I think it’ s also just this great meeting of time and place that enters our imagination. I mean, opera capes and chandeliers and masked balls… All of that stuff really enters the imagination like the great sequences of ROMEO AND JULIET or WAR AND PEACE, or even GONE WITH THE WIND for that matter. It’s just on of those great romantic tales that sticks with us. And it’s a great date movie. It’s got something for everybody. Boys and girls both like it.

What always attracted me the most about PHANTOM was the idea of this well dressed, attractive gentlemen, but a masked gentleman, with his identity hidden under this slick, glossy veneer. He could be an angel. He could be a Devil. Or, he could be both.

Which is so very Freudian. I mean, we all have that fantasy. The idea of the mask. Seeing all, but unseen yourself. You know, there’s a great story. Apparently, Truman Capote, who wrote IN COLD BLOOD among many others, had a great masked ball in 1967 at the Plaza in New York. And legend has it that it’s the greatest party in the history of Am erica (laughs). Unbelievably famous people in government and celebrity and in social standing and in Hollywood and Broadway got together, and people did things they would never consider doing. People stepped across gender lines and sexuality lines. People who would never have thought of doing it back then in the late 60’s. The mask allowed them to do it. And there are stories and gossip and rumors about that party at the Plaza Hotel. And about pairings between just extraordinary people whom you would never imagine connecting otherwise. In the closet. Out of the closet. Under the stairs. In the elevator. Wherever. And it was all done because of the freedom of the mask. I’m sure drugs were involved, too (laughs).

With the exception of a confederate flag eye patch, you’re pretty much unencumbered make-up wise in 2001 MANIACS. Was that strange for you?

Well, you know, what was so fun with 2001 MANIACS was that there was this nice, natural arc in the script, this nice rhythm with the dialogue of my character, Mayor Buckman. There was a certain physicality to Buckman as well, but he was more of a language character. And also, because of its origins, the Herschell Gordon Lewis cult classic, 2001 MANIACS always began as something birthed from pop culture. It’s always has been a little bit trashy, but definitely on purpose. That distillation of pop culture by pop culture. So, I kept throwing out my source imagery to you, this kind of Colonel Sanders from Hell idea, that Tennessee Williams big daddy character, even a little DUKES OF HAZARD in terms of cartoonish choices, and combining all of those angles together. So when you have those kind of sources, when you’re able to act that kind of language, you really have to jump in there and commit, and that does really liberate you. Not in the same way that a mask or make-up does, but it still liberates you.

Ironically, perhaps the more shielded you are, whether it’s a literal mask or the mask of a character you are portraying, the truer you might be able to be to your authentic self. That’s actually something I discussed with Paul Stanley, the idea of hiding behind a persona.

And Paul did it twice, with KISS and with Phantom. And he will probably tell you, as an actor, as a performer, the mask is very liberating. Even though you’re dealing with the vanity of sitting in front of a mirror everyday putting on all that make-up, once its on, it’s not you any longer, so you’re never dealing with your own physiology. Your thinning hairline, a blemish you got from eating too much chocolate off the craft service table, your good side, your bad side… You’re not dealing with any of that. You’re completely free of that and its very freeing for a performer. But, yes, Tim, the mask does really open doors for people in their own imaginations. On a lot of levels. Even on a revenge level. On a purely revenge motif, which probably feeds the male adolescent fascination with horror and serial killers, or even Ebots, in Gameboy now. To be that anonymous avenger of your own art or your own dreams or whatever it is you really believe in, deep down the depth of your soul…

Click HERE to purchase Robert Englund’s 1989 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA from MGM Home Video.