Fast forward to two days ago, when I threw open a random cupboard and just happened to find a copy of MGM’s home video release of the film, still factory sealed. “This sounds absolutely bonkers,” I thought (for reasons that will soon become clear), before promptly putting it out of my mind. Right around Halloween, shortly after I’d fallen in love with Suspiria, I was researching Dario Argento’s infamously awful adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s novel when I stumbled across a few fleeting scraps of information regarding this 1989… let’s be charitable and call it a reinterpretation of the material. This was replaced by showing Harrison being thrown against the wall and then sliding down with the towel still wrapped around his face.This one requires elaboration. It was trimmed for being a little too violent and the water heater seemed for a death scene.

Originally, the Phantom puts a towel around his face and squeezes it tightly and shows a close up shot of the bones in Harrison's face breaking and blood pouring through the towel and then showing the Phantom throwing his body against a burning water heater without the towel around his face and showing his broken face burning on the heater.

Harrison's death in the sauna room was quite a little more violent.

But it was trimmed to show Mott's expression and then shows the Phantom holding the head and throwing it at Mott.

When the Phantom attacks the second thief, he cuts off his head with a knife, the original scene showed the knife being stabbed into the thief's neck and cutting it off completely. The scene where the Phantom kills the three thieves was quite a little longer.The scene where the Phantom skins the stagehand Joseph Buquet.The following scenes were trimmed for an R-rating:

The phantom of the opera 1989