The Phantom of the Opera (1998 film) The Phantom of the Opera (1998 film) The Phantom of the Opera () is a 1998 Italian horror film directed by Dario Argento, adapted from the novel "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra" by Gaston Leroux. However, there are many differences between the book and the film (the biggest being that the Phantom is not disfigured). In Paris 1877 a pack of rats save an abandoned baby from a basket that was flowing along a river. They raise him in the underground of the Opéra de Paris. This child becomes the Phantom of the Opera, a misanthrope who kills anyone who ventures
The Phantom of the Opera (1986 musical) make the leap from film to stage. Later, in New York, Lloyd Webber found a second-hand copy of the original, long-out-of-print Leroux novel, which supplied the necessary inspiration to develop a musical: "I was actually writing something else at the time, and I realised that the reason I was hung up was because I was trying to write a major romantic story, and I had been trying to do that ever since I started my career. Then with the Phantom, it was there!" Lloyd Webber first approached Jim Steinman to write the lyrics because of his "dark obsessive side", but