The Sublime and the Sewer: Gothic Dualism and Symbolic Space in Dario Argento’s The Phantom of the Opera

This article analyses Dario Argento’s 1998 film The Phantom of the Opera as a distinctive reworking of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. Rather than viewing it as an incoherent departure, the study reads the film as a cinematic exploration of Leroux’s unstable binaries—human/animal, child/adult, grand opera/carnival, and female otherness—central to the Gothic tradition. Employing close textual and visual analysis, combined with Gothic theory and art-historical interpretation, the article examines how Argento reimagines the Phantom as an attractive yet internally hybrid figure raised by rats, his subterranean lair evoking Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead and the fin-de-siècle homme de génie. Christine is reframed as a psychologically ambivalent heroine whose descent mirrors a confrontation with repressed desires, conveyed through tableaux referencing artists such as Jean-François Millet and Georges de La Tour. The Paris Opera House becomes a site where sublime artistic ideals are undermined by grotesque caricatures, echoing Victor Hugo’s grotesque–sublime aesthetic. Blending Gothic symbolism, carnivalesque satire, and art-historical homage, the film emerges as a visual meditation on identity, hybridity, and the instability of moral and social boundaries.