The very best thing about The Phantom of the Opera is that it shows us a possibly supernatural occurrence, then gives us a natural explanation that is infinitely crazier than the supernatural one would have been.
What if there was a ghost in the opera house that was killing people?
Requires you to accept the existence of ghosts, but otherwise is a straightforward story.
What if the chief contractor who built the opera house was a deformed circus freak who used his experience building palaces and torture chambers for sultans to keep building secret passageways and torture chambers in the basement when construction halted during the Franco-Prussian War, and then kept living down there working on an opera and killing and blackmailing people who crossed him and also training a pretty opera singer that he wants to marry?
There is nothing in the world that could have prepared me to expect even half of that.
