httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgiPXFVY0T8&feature=channel

The movie that haunted Frye as a child, The Phantom of the Opera. (The full movie appears at the link above.)

Frye in “Notebook 12”:

I have a feeling — probably it is just one of those would-be profound feelings that it’s comfortable to have — that I cannot really get at the centre of a problem unless something in it goes back to childhood impressions.  Thus my New Comedy ideas, the core of everything I did after Blake, go back to my [Horatio] Alger reading, and now I think the clue to this labyrinth is the sentimental romance of the 19th century, the roots of which are in Scott.  While I lived on Bathurst St. I was constantly reading ghost stories with similar patterns in mind, & Poe & Hawthorne have always been favorites.  Underground caves; the Phantom of the Opera & the like, are all part of the Urthona penseroso pattern.  (CW 9, 141-2)