In observance of that autumn spell when we celebrate the primal, compulsive instinct of fear, Rainestorm highlights 31 days of spooky scares to season the eerie atmosphere of Halloween.

This week we pay obligatory homage to the studio that brought some of finest thrills and greatest cinematic cheese to the 20th century. It’s Universal Monster Week!

Reign of terror: 1925

The horror… the horror: Though not technically part of the Universal monster movie canon, this release became the catalyst for the studio to launch its long-running classic horror series. Already a legend by the time this movie was made, Lon Chaney decisively dominates this silent horror gem. Well-known from The Hunchback of Notre Dame as a maestro of make-up, he was allowed here to create the fiendish Phantom’s ghoulish appearance, and the result is staggering. To this day, it remains perhaps the most accurate representation of the Phantom as described in Gaston Leroux’s novel. Indeed, though I had seen the legendary unmasking shot countless times before I saw the film in its entirety, watching it in context rather caught me up. At the time of its release, it was said to be so shocking as to make audience members swoon in fright. Though it has been remade countless times since (including a rather good 1989 version with Robert Englund), and has been running as a stage musical for decades, this iconic antecedent is still the benchmark by which all others have been (and likely will be) judged.

Halloween haunt: Much of the film plays out in murky shadows with disembodied limbs protruding from doorways. The opera house is replete with endless underground passageways and torture chambers. The Bal Masque (of the Red Death) presents the Phantom as Edgar Allan Poe’s legendary grim reaper.

Tastiest treat: That immortal unmasking, which remains a jolting image to this day.

Check the candy for: The now missing, and perhaps forever lost, sound version from 1930.

Devilish discourse: “Feast your eyes — glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!”

Goes great with: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). The film that inspired Universal to make The Phantom of the Opera and subsequently launched the legendary Universal monster movie series.