How Lon Chaney's Makeup Transformed Hollywood Horror

With his expressive visage and spectacular use of makeup, silent-era star Lon Chaney Sr. earned the moniker “The Man of a Thousand Faces.” He also utilized those many faces to convey empathy for his horror characters, exploring the humanity of society’s most marginalized figures. From his work in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) to The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Chaney’s makeup techniques didn’t just come to define monstrosity, they sold him as an Artiste willing to suffer for his craft.

In the 1910s and '20s, there were no special-effects makeup departments like we have today. To transform into his characters, Chaney devised all his own applications, making him an early makeup designer in addition to a performer.

“Chaney was the first actor/makeup artist to show the cinema-going public what makeup could do for an actor,” says Michael F. Blake, author of The Films of Lon Chaney (2001).

Chaney was born as a child of Deaf adults (CODA). Because of his parents’ deafness, he was fluent in American Sign Language (ASL)—a skill that likely lent itself to his work in silent films. Through this upbringing, Chaney also sought to tell empathetic stories about people who were different from the status quo.

“I wanted to remind people that the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice. The dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals,” Chaney wrote in 1925. We see this in the likes of The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and many of his other films in which outcasts seek redemption.

Chaney's extreme makeup applications connected him to his audience; not only through the characters' traumas as seen in their physical conditions but through his own pain in crafting the performance, Angela M. Smith explains in Hideous Progeny (2012). They emphasized “the real pains and impairments endured by particular horror actors.”

Numerous stories recount the painful harnesses he wore for The Penalty (1920) and The Unknown (1927), which cut off circulation and led to frequent collapses on set. He was also said to have worn a 50-pound rubber bodysuit for his role as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and a “contoured wire appliance to flare back and pull his nose," causing pain and bleeding while performing in The Phantom of the Opera.

Though these stories have endured to give Chaney a mystique and craft a litany of horror icons, several are apocryphal—particularly the Hunchback story, explains Blake. The hump “was made of plaster of paris and weighed no more than 15 to 20 pounds,” he says. “And that comes direct from Patsy Ruth Miller [the actress in Hunchback] who was thrown over Lon’s back” in the movie.

It’s easy to understand where the stories have come from, he adds. Chaney died at just 47 in 1930, and the concept of his suffering for art immediately became a way of examining his legacy.

Though these stories are compelling, for Blake the true beauty comes from what Chaney was able to achieve simply through contouring, highlighting and shadowing—techniques that are still used by makeup artists to this day. In fact, Chaney literally wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on makeup itself in 1929.

In addition to wires hidden under putty to create the lifted-nose effect seen in the character of the Phantom, Chaney explains that “A broad nose may be narrowed by drawing a highlight down the ridge of the nose with light paint, shading with red at the sides to determine the contour.” He also built up his cheekbones and eye sockets with cotton and liquid latex (or collodion) to create the illusion of sunken flesh and bone. The final design was so effective that reports claimed women regularly fainted in the audience at the reveal.

Chaney, whose innovations created a blueprint for the future of horror, is "widely acknowledged as the most important early innovator of motion picture makeup effects."

Jack Pierce drew from his example in designing the Universal Monsters of the 1930s (Pierce would also design the Wolf Man played by Lon Chaney Jr). That lineage continues through practical effect and makeup artists like Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th), who cites Chaney as his first inspiration. Creature performer Doug Jones carries the empathetic monster torch in several Guillermo del Toro films like The Shape of Water (2017), and del Toro himself credits Chaney’s infamous Phantom face reveal as "seminal."

In a world of computer-generated imagery, Chaney represents the human artistry of horror makeup and practical effects. He could make characters who looked utterly gruesome and garner empathy despite how scary they were.