10 Horror Musicals You Need To See
6. The Phantom Of The Paradise
In between borrowing from Alfred Hitchcock and adapting Stephen King, Brian De Palma made this trashy, thoroughly enjoyable rock opera version of The Phantom Of The Opera, which brought camp horror to the screen a year before The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Come to think of it, De Palma’s movie foreshadows Rocky Horror in several ways, from a deliberately OTT rocker named Beef (who looks like a cross between Frank N Furter and Meat Loaf) to the casting of Jessica Harper, who also appeared in Shock Treatment.
Wrongly promoted as a spoof back in 1974, the movie flopped when audiences failed to embrace songwriter Paul Williams (“We’ve Only Just Begun”) as an evil record tycoon whose duplicity results in a freak accident that disfigures a composer and causes him to take refuge inside The Paradise, a rock palace. You can probably guess the rest, but don’t expect to hear to hear anything classical – Williams also composed the film’s score.