Meanwhile on Earth Clip Unleashes Chainsaw Violence

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Writer/Director Jérémy Clapin, whose 2019 animated debut, I Lost My Body, earned an Academy Award nomination, makes the jump to live-action with the sci-fi thriller Meanwhile on Earth. Today, we have an exclusive clip that sets up violent psychological horror.

Metrograph Pictures releases Meanwhile on Earth in theaters on November 8, 2024.

In the film, “Elsa (Megan Northam, in her debut feature starring role), along with her family, is struggling following the disappearance of her brother Franck, an astronaut who vanished during his first mission. While stargazing one night, Elsa is shocked to receive contact from Franck, but her joy is short-lived when she learns of the dark and troubling forces behind Franck’s reappearance, forcing her to confront the lengths she will go for the brother she once feared was gone forever.”

Sébastien Pouderoux, Catherine Salée, and Dimitri Doré also star.

Watch the clip below, which unleashes a violent chainsaw confrontation in the woods. Or does it? Things are getting weird in the woods and nothing may be as it seems.

Clapin’s sophomore effort was edited by Jean-Christophe Bouzy, Titane and Raw filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s longtime film editor. Robrecht Heyvaert (Revenge) is the film’s cinematographer.

“Jérémy Clapin is a hugely talented filmmaker, and he has created an exciting and inspiring new work of science fiction. Meanwhile on Earth is reminiscent of the best of the genre, combining an innovative, visionary world and compelling supernatural premise with deeply emotional, real-life underpinnings,” Metrograph Pictures head David Laub previously told Deadline about the film’s acquisition.

Meanwhile on Earth is produced by Marc Du Pontavice and executive produced by Luc Bricault.

Horror journalist, RT Top Critic, and Critics Choice Association member. Has appeared on PBS series' Monstrum, served on the SXSW Midnighter shorts jury, and moderated horror panels for WonderCon, SeriesFest, and Popcorn Frights Film Fest.

‘Meanwhile on Earth’ Trailer – Sci-Fi Thriller from ‘I Lost My Body’ Director Gets Psychological

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In the mid-1970s, there was a brief trend going on in the film world: the rock opera movie musical. These were films that had a considerable edge to them, that were attempting to tap into the counter culture generation. In 1975 alone, you had both Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Who’s Tommy come out. But even before that, in 1974, Brian De Palma – who was a mere two years away from the game changer that was Carrie – unleashed his rock opera epic into theaters, Phantom of the Paradise.

Phantom follows a composer named Winslow who wrote a cantata about Faust – a story in which someone sells their soul to the devil. In the case of life imitating art, his opus is stolen by a powerful mogul named Swan, leading Winslow to haunt the newly opened Paradise Theater as a Phantom. The film successfully blends the 70’s rock and roll with horror, comedy, and a classic German folk legend. Throw in a production that kept running out of money, some frivolous lawsuits from Led Zeppelin and Universal Studios, and another studio that never quite understood how to properly market the film, and you’ve got the ingredients that make up Phantom of the Paradise.

Upon release, the film more or less came and went, except for in two places: Winnipeg and Paris. In those two random cities, the film became the legend that it ought to have been everywhere else. 50 years later, there are entire festivals dedicated to the film, and directors like Edgar Wright and Guillermo Del Toro both cite the film as a massive influence on their respective careers. The more time that goes on, the more people discover this film and the stronger the cult following grows. Quite an interesting trajectory for a film that was written off by everyone else as having been a complete bomb in the 1970’s. Great art has a way of rising to the top sometimes, even if it’s decades later.

In celebration of the film’s 50th anniversary, we recently spoke with the film’s composer/star Paul Williams, actors Peter Elbling and Jeffrey Comanor, legendary editor Paul Hirsch, and historian/archivist Ari Kahan.

The origins of Phantom of the Paradise starts with – of all things – a Beatles song. As Brian De Palma was standing in an elevator and heard a Beatles classic coming through as muzak, he suddenly realized that even music isn’t safe from corporate America finding new ways to profit all of it, and stripping it of its beauty. After this experience, De Palma came up with the idea for a script in which a songwriter sells his soul to the devil: Phantom of the Fillmore.

ARI KAHAN (HISTORIAN/ARCHIVIST, THE SWAN ARCHIVES): That first draft was very different. It was lacking the supernatural elements. It’s a lot more vulgar.

PAUL WILLIAMS (COMPOSER/ACTOR, “SWAN”): The script really involved in ways. At the time, we were still deep into the Vietnam war. We’re watching Vietnam war news, while we’re eating our TV dinners. So the boundary between the news and our entertainment began to get muddier and muddier. It got to that point where Philbin says to me [in the movie] – my favorite line in the movie – “You’re going to have her shot in the middle of the wedding? Why would you have somebody killed on live television?” I say “An assassination live on coast-to-coast television? That’s entertainment!”

KAHAN: De Palma worked with a cowriter named Louisa Rose – who also co-wrote Sisters with him. And they sold the script to Filmways and then they ended up buying it back. It got sold two or three times and then bought back before producer Ed Pressman finally ended up with it and did it with De Palma. But the price they sold it to Pressman for Louisa felt it wasn’t enough. And so in order to do the deal without her, De Palma basically pulled back out of the script everything she had contributed.

WILLIAMS: I was at A&M Records. I went from a lot of years writing songs that wound up on albums on B-Sides that nobody ever heard on the radio, to a period from about the end of 1970 to 1973 when I had a bunch of hits. Based on what I had done, there was not anybody that Brian De Palma could’ve picked that seemed like a worse idea to write the songs for Phantom of the Paradise. I always said that I wrote co-dependent love songs. But A&M hired a guy named Michael Arciaga to try to get them more involved in the film business. And one of the first meetings that he took was with Brian De Palma. I don’t know why he pitched me to De Palma or if Brian knew anything about me, but he sent me a script – Phantom of the Filmore -, and I loved it.

KAHAN: The name was originally Phantom of the Fillmore, but they couldn’t get the rights from Bill Graham for the Fillmore. Which actually, I think is a good thing because I like that it takes place in this comic book fantasy world, as opposed to some particular real world locale.

The film was gaining traction. Producer Ed Pressman found a real estate developer who agreed to put up $750,000, enough to get things started. With that, they were off and running. While De Palma originally wrote the role of the Phantom for his good friend and frequent collaborator, William Finley, he had another thought in mind when he first met Paul Williams.

WILLIAMS: When Brian saw me, his first thought – and I think he was joking – was “Maybe you should play the Phantom.” I said “Get out of here.” He said “You can play this little guy, crawling around in the rafter throwing things on people.” I said “No, no, no, no, no.” You see the way that Bill Finley with one eye manages to tear your heart out. I’m not that good of an actor. But he said “There’s kind of this Phil Spector thing you turn into when you’re in the studio. What about playing Swan?” And I went “Bingo!”

Finley was now back in as Winslow/the Phantom. With Williams on as Swan, this meant that Gerritt Graham – another De Palma staple who the role of Swan was written for – in turn took on the role of Beef, the glam rocker who Swan hires to sing the Faust cantata. For the female lead, Phoenix, De Palma cast Jessica Harper after seeing her in a play in New York. She had no film experience. As for the members of the band The Juicy Fruits – who have to sing a wide range of music that’s influenced by 50’s rock, The Beach Boys, and the glam rock musicians of the 70’s -, De Palma approached the band Sha Na Na. But they fell out, and the search was on.

JEFFREY COMANOR (ACTOR, “THE JUICY FRUITS”): I was at A&M Records, but when Phantom came along, I wasn’t anymore. In ‘74, I think I was living in San Francisco. Paul was a writer for A&M, and he had an office there. So I went by to see what Paul’s doing, because we became quite friendly. I say “So what are you up to?” And he says “I’m doing a movie. I’m writing the score and I’m starring in it.” I said “Cool! What kind of movie?” He said “It’s a horror movie.” I said “I want to be in it!” I didn’t really try to go out for acting in Hollywood, but I really liked horror movies.

PETER ELBLING (ACTOR, “THE JUICY FRUITS”): I was in a little acting company, which I can’t really remember. There was a group of people who used to meet, and Bill Finley was one of them. So I was friends with Bill, and when the original National Lampoon Lemmings company went on the road – the one that included John Belushi and Chevy Chase – I knew Tony Hendra, who produced it. So he called me and said “Would you like to take Belushi’s place?” I was delighted.

COMANOR: They were having auditions at Paul’s house. So I showed up and there’s a house full of people. Brian was in the living room, and it looked like all these actor types. And I thought “Fuck. I don’t know how to do an audition. I ain’t an actor.” Someone introduced me, and I shake hands with Brian and I look at him. I go “You look familiar. Did you go to Columbia Film School?” “Yeah.” I was in this band in New York, the High Five. I said “Did you make a student film called Murder a La Mod?” And he said “Yes.” I look at him and said “You motherfucker. You never paid my band. We played the soundtrack on that film, and you screwed us for $300!!” And that was my audition. I walk out of that room like “Well, there goes that.” And next thing you know, I was in the movie.

ELBLING: While I was doing Lemmings, Bill brought Brian down to see the show. Because he knew about the movie, obviously. He and Brian were very tight. Afterwards, Brian said “There’s a group called The Juicy Fruits. would you like to be part of it?” And I said “Yes, I’d love to.” He said “Do you know anybody else?” I said “Oh god, yes.” Because I knew Archie Hahn. We worked together in The Committee and I had done a children’s show he was part of. I knew what a great singer he was and a wonderful comedian and comic actor. So he became the other Juicy Fruit.

WILLIAMS: I had become friends with Liza Minelli. Liza was going up to Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe to play Harrah’s for a month. And she said “I want you to open for me.” I’m doing two shows a night with nothing to do during the day and I’m writing the songs. I had my road band with me. And my road band is the one that played on the Phantom soundtrack, on Bugsy Malone. We became so close that I’d walk in and start singing something and they’re playing chords behind me. And I could walk in and go “Okay, we’re doing a Beach Boys thing. Bum-ba-ba-da-bum… Upholstery.” And all of a sudden, it’s sounding like a Beach Boys record.

Because we were fans of the music that we were satirizing – certainly all of us knew it well enough to recreate it. I had never written anything like “Somebody Super Like You” or “Life at Last”. But I just became a member of a rock and roll band. I became a member of a metal glam band. And the script is the bible. And the script was very fluid and it was developing along the way, and I just got caught up in the vibe that is Brian De Palma. Something happened and it came out of me musically.

ELBLING: When I met Brian, he muttered out of nowhere “Now all I need is a choreographer.” And at that time, I was a comic actor doing a lot of very physical stuff. I said “Well, I’ll do it.” So I choreographed the Juicy Fruits numbers. And then they said “Well, aren’t you going to do Gerrit’s?” And I said “Oh yes. Of course!” So I choreographed Gerrit’s number and then choreographed Jessica’s number.

With the cast and music in locked in, it was time to begin production. Production started up on November 26th, 1973 in California. The first day of production, however, was interrupted when smoke started to come through the ventilation system where they were filming, and everyone had to clear out. Given the film’s subject matter, this led to lots of jokes about “the devil.”

PAUL HIRSCH (EDITOR): The interior of Swan’s Mansion was in the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, and Swan’s mirrored bedroom was on a soundstage at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. The shooting was delayed a couple of hours because the paint wasn’t dry yet. They set up fans to speed the process.

KAHAN: Jack Fisk made a lot out of a little. And their cinematographer – Larry Pizer – lit things very nicely. And De Palma’s a bit of a perfectionist as far as that stuff goes. And so it looks a lot better than it deserves to look for the money that was spent, for sure.

WILLIAMS: Thanks to Jack Fisk and Larry Enzer the cinematographer, it had this “cartoon done with real people” kind of a look to it. But tucked in that was the depth of the human experience for loss and injustice and all this stuff. And it was done with these iconic characters like Faust and Dorian Gray and those tales. It’s amazing,

After a few weeks in Los Angeles, production moved to Dallas. This is where the majority of the film would be shot, including all of the sequences at the Paradise theater, which in reality, was the Majestic.

KAHAN: The people who were there describe it as a fun shoot. Even De Palma describes it as a fun shoot. You have a lot of people for whom it was their first big film, and they had high expectations for it. When they were in Texas, they would all have dinner together every night.

COMANOR: We were very comfortable. We stayed at the Four Seasons near the venue. What was nice was the hotel we were at had four different really nice upscale restaurants. So you had a different place to eat every night and we never left the hotel.

HIRSCH: I was still in my 20s and being around the production was very exciting for me. Of course there are always difficulties on low budget films, but I remember a collegial atmosphere. We used to gather after each day’s shooting to watch dailies, and being on location, the cast and crew would spend time together on days off. We shot over Christmas of 1973, and a bunch of us went to see The Exorcist, which had just opened. We were so freaked out that we all then went to see The Sting, just to get those horrific images out of our heads.

WILLIAMS: It was so much fun, as you can imagine. And Brian seemed to embrace this total, very uncharacteristic for him sentimental side. I remember putting this little piano thing in when Bill is dying. And Brian said “Oh my god. There won’t be a dry eye in the house.” And my side of it is “And let’s show a really good closeup of the face in the record press.” It’s like we traded personalities during the shoot.

HIRSCH: Brian has always been a great visualist. He places great emphasis on telling stories with images. Although he has a great eye for young acting talent, having introduced many actors who went on to have long careers, he is not fond of overly talky films. His interest is in creating something new and exciting with the visual, the images.

WILLIAMS: I think the way he directs actors is in conversation, as opposed to being specific to the moment. I think he creates the space and the story and the elements for what comes out of you that he captures. I think that his direction of the actors is more in setting them on a course to a certain set of emotions or emotional responses. It’s almost as if he respects the actors’ emotional response to be appropriate and it surprises him.

COMANOR: One thing I noticed about Brian was he would ask the actors what they wanted to do. Like the first scene in the movie is where the Juicy Fruits are doing the Grease number. Brian asks me “What do you want to do in the break?” I said “Well, give me a dork and I’ll beat the shit out of him onstage.”

ELBLING: Brian – like a lot of directors – they hire you and they expect you to do your stuff. So it wasn’t like Brian was directing us, except he’d say “Stand over there” or do this or whatever.

WILLIAMS: And then working with Bill Finley, there was so much person there and so little ego. I loved Montgomery Cliff as an actor. There was this brokenness, this vulnerability. And at this moment, I’m realizing that there was a since of that with Bill. Bill Finley had this ability to just be there. It’s shocking when he turns on Philbin in the dressing room scene. He can be terrifying, he looks dangerous. He can do that. And at the same token, he can play that intense victim.

One of the film’s most iconic scenes takes place at a completely supernatural rock concert, with the popular band The Juicy Fruits now becoming the Undeads – in full menacing makeup -, before introducing Swan’s big discovery: Beef.

HIRSCH: I went to the set each day because I couldn’t begin cutting the sequence until I had all the material, and the filming took several days. As I recall, a crowd was recruited from the public by offering a free concert, as well as a chance to be in a movie, but the turnout was far from filling all the seats.

ELBLING: Let’s say that theater held a thousand people. There were only maybe 100 in the audience. So Brian kept moving them around.

HIRSCH: The crowd was moved around, from setup to setup, to create the impression that there were more people there than there actually were. I was recruited to supplement the crowd, and I appear in some of the angles facing out into the audience.

COMMANOR: We did look mean. Peter is perfectly menacing. It was so much fun cutting off the body parts from the audience. I hoped that I would not drop the head that was thrown to me.

WILLIAMS: We’re shooting at the Majestic Theater, we’re shooting onstage. They’re dissembling everything and taking it up to the box and shooting the scenes up there of looking down on the stage. Then they’re going back down to the stage then we’re looking up there. And I go up to Brian on the stage and I go “You know, anybody that’s been on a set realized that if you had a Chapman crane on the stage, you could move the crane back and forth and save all that time.” And without even looking away from his eyepiece, he said “This stage won’t support a Chapman crane.” And I was like “Oh. Um okay. So I’ll be in the hollow you have for me of a dressing room, keeping my mouth shut.”

COMANOR: In my solo, we get blown up in the end in the car. Andy Epper was our stunt guy who did the explosion. To get a good explosion, to make things look more dangerous than they are, you add fire. We get blown up in that scene. One of the ways you get an explosion lots of flame without concussion is naphthalene flakes. Highly flammable, bright. And Andy Epper put way too many naphthalene flakes into the car that we get pushed onto the stage in. So we go offstage and they set off the explosion. That came down as napalm and we all got burnt badly. And then the Dallas Fire Department was there to put out the flame, because it was by the curtains. We all got little dots of burns on our arms.

Despite everyone getting along pretty well during their Dallas stay, that’s not to say that complications didn’t arise. After all, it was a completely independently financed production. Along the way, those finances started depleting. After they went over-schedule, they had to pack up camp again and move to New York to finish the film.

KAHAN: They were constantly running out of money during the shoot, where checks were bouncing and that kind of thing. And so Ed Pressman was always sort of raising money for chapter three as they’re shooting chapter two and that sort of thing.

WILLIAMS: I’m not sure what was going on with the finances, but I know there was a lot of wandering around and having conversations about the financing and “What are we doing?”

KAHAN: I’m sure that Ed Pressman had a lot weighing on him because he knew that he didn’t have money. But it’s not clear to me that anybody else was particularly worried about that.

COMANOR: We did run over time, and so we had to stay there for Christmas. Which we didn’t want to do. There was a flu going around and people were getting sick. And they even had a nurse on set, in the theater, giving people B12 shots. So they were really concerned with people being well enough to do their scenes.

KAHAN: I don’t think that they intended to shoot in three cities. It came from they were having problems with the unions in Texas clashing with the guys from LA. And they overstayed their agreement with the Majestic, and so they ended up leaving Texas and doing what was left in New York. But I don’t think they ever intended to.

After working all through the holidays in Texas, filming finally wrapped in New York at the end of January. What was supposed to be a seven week shoot wound up going for ten. Now, it was into the editing room.

HIRSCH: I love cutting to music, it’s like dancing without the physical effort. The big concert at the Paradise was particularly challenging, partly because of its length and the number of choices I had, because Brian covered it from so many angles. But then I was limited to the takes where the lip sync was correct. All of this was exacerbated by my inexperience, not having a music editor, and the technology of the era.

The montage I directed [where the Phantom is writing his masterpiece] was also challenging because I had to dream up something to shoot. Watching Winslow composing is not terribly visual, and I had to come up with images to fill out the time occupied by even an edited-down version of the song. I turned to the montages of Slavko Vorkapich for inspiration. I decided the key was to express time passing, with spinning hands on clocks, calendar pages and a candle burning down and then out, as a button on the scene. I was conscious of creating motion in everything because all the elements I was shooting were still. So I shot against a black background and had the camera pan, tilt and zoom to generate the sensation of movement.

COMANOR: My one big solo in the movie was a split screen, very distracting. So I was not very happy about that. But it is what it is.

HIRSCH: The Beach Boys number, “Upholstery”, was always planned as a split screen. The idea was to marry two simultaneously filmed tracking shots. It’s also a parody of, or homage to, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.

KAHAN: The film was produced independently and De Palma and Pressman raised money in the hope that they’d be able to sell it to somebody, which was done. And there was a bidding war, actually, between several studios. Fox, which at the time was very desperate to court the youth market, won the bidding war. And they paid more for distribution rights than anyone had ever paid for an independent film previously. So they had very high hopes.

HIRSCH: I was in NYC and got a phone call from Brian, telling me that Fox had bought the rights and there was a tremendous amount of excitement. They were planning a screening on the lot, in the Little Theater, and an after party. “Get on a plane and get out here!” I did and flew out that weekend. The after party is when I first met Marcia Lucas, who took me by the hand and dragged me through the crowd at the party to introduce me to George.

That initial excitement, however, was short-lived. In the wake of the acquisition, two potential lawsuits came to the fray. Not the kind of news that Fox wanted to hear. The first was Universal, who felt that the film infringed on their property, Phantom of the Opera.

KAHAN: The Universal issue was that the story skewed too closely to what they viewed as their Phantom of the Opera storyline, and I actually think Universal had a point. In the original book and the Lon Cheney version of the film, you never find out how the Phantom got to be disfigured. He might have been born that way. He wasn’t a composer who was wronged and had his music stolen and got disfigured in the course of trying to stop the publication of his music. He was a guy who had strong opinions about music and lived in the sewer below the opera house.

But in the Universal versions in the 50’s and 60’s, they added new story elements where the phantom was this composer who had been ripped off and gets his face scarred in the course of trying to prevent publication of his music. Those story elements were new and still under copyright. De Palma’s version obviously used those story elements, so Universal got a chunk of money.

HIRSCH: It all boiled down to the fact that Ed Pressman had neglected to take out an errors and omissions policy, which is designed to protect against claims of copyright infringement. This was the biggest error and omission.

Then there was the Led Zeppelin lawsuit threat. Unlike the other, this one affected the film.

KAHAN: Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant managed a band called Stone the Crows, which came to an end in 1971 or 72 when its lead singer, Les Harvey, got electrocuted onstage in a freak accident. And Peter Grant caught wind that there was going to be a film that was coming out that featured the electrocution of a rockstar onstage. He felt that this was making fun of what had happened to his friend Les Harvey. So he swore he would spend his last dime to prevent the release of the film. But, of course, you can’t stop someone from doing something that is similar to what happened in real life. De Palma didn’t in fact base Beef’s demise on Les Harvey. There were drafts of the Phantom script where Beef got electrocuted onstage that actually pre-date what happened to Mr. Harvey.

So in the film, Swan had his company Swan Enterpirises named after himself. And the Swan Song Enterprises name was featured prominently throughout the film. By sheer coincidence, in-between the time that the movie was shot and released, Led Zeppelin got a trademark for Swan Song as their record label. And Peter Grant realized he luckily had this card in his pocket, where he could say “Look, I’ve got a trademark on Swan Song and if you use Swan Song as his record label, I will sue you to prevent release of the movie.” Just through the world’s craziest coincidence. He brought this claim weeks before the film was to be released.

HIRSCH: This was definitely the 11th hour, so I only got instructions to get rid of any visuals with the words Swan Song in them. The art director had made a logo for the fictitious company and had used it on posters in the film, on the backs of some of the bikers’ jackets, on street signs and over doors. I had also created it for a wipe, using it to cross the screen and transition from one scene to another. The VFX tools in those days were crude compared to what came later, and many of the shots could only be addressed by cutting them short or out. Others were covered with ugly mattes that we might have improved on but we had absolutely no time.

KAHAN: Had he sued, he would’ve lost. This was a very stupid claim. But he could’ve held the film up in litigation and Fox didn’t want that. Fox had just bought the film and told them “You need to fix this, because we want to get this out there before Tommy comes out and steals all the rock opera thunder.”

With a lawsuit avoided, the film was released in LA at the National Theater on October 31st, a fitting release date for the film. Sadly, it was not a commercial success in the majority of the world.

ELBLING: I think it was the first of its kind, in the sense that it was a rock and roll horror comedy. And I don’t think people quite knew what to do with it.

HIRSCH: It was extremely disappointing and depressing. We had hoped that it would be snapped up by people of our generation and become a cult hit, the way The Rocky Horror Picture Show was, later that year. But the NY papers were merciless.

KAHAN: I attribute it to crappy promotion. And specifically I think 20th Century Fox pushed a lot of the promotion to A&M Records. And they then promoted it as if it were a music product. So they did a lot of print, a lot of interviews, a lot of radio advertising with Wolfman Jack and that sort of thing, which is not the right way to sell that film. The right way to sell that film is with TV advertising, because what’s powerful and unique about it is kind of the way that it looks, the costumes, and the colors and all that stuff.

ELBLING: I think it was a question of promotion. Because I think they changed the advertising a couple of times. There was one ad with Bill as the Phantom in the recording studio. I think that was the original ad, so I think they changed that, because it wasn’t doing the job they wanted.

WILLIAMS: There were two cities where it did well. Winnipeg and Paris. Having probably less in common than any two cities you could pick in the world.

KAHAN: El Salvador is actually where it did the best, but nobody ever talks about that.

ELBLING: This is what I heard. When it first came out, it was a PG movie. And so one enterprising theater owner decided to put it on in his theater on Saturdays for kids. And all these kids came from ages 6 to 11 because it was PG. And they could not believe it. Suddenly, they’re seeing a rock and roll movie with horror in it and there’s comedy in it. The theater owner was like astonished at the reception. So he then began to book it every Saturday for close to a year I think. He booked it at 10, 12, 2, and 4. And parents – realizing they had a Saturday free – began dropping off their kids at 10 in the morning. So these kids saw Phantom 3 times in a day, and they saw it for months on end.

KAHAN: Winnipeg was the only place that I’m aware of where it did get saturation television advertising, and in particular, if was heavily advertised on TV during the after-school kids shows. Every day you watched that and saw two or three commercials for Phantom of the Paradise. That’s partly why – if you look at the Winnipeg fandom – it’s pretty much all people that were between 11 and 13 when the film came out. They’re all exactly the same age now. And if it had been advertised that way everywhere; I think it probably would’ve done a lot better everywhere.

ELBLING: People forget that he was nominated for an Academy Award for the score. It scored on many different levels. It was definitely rock and roll, and it was definitely different types of rock and roll. It was a masterful performance.

Phantom had become something of a phenomenon in Winnipeg, something that was not discovered by those who made it until many years later. By then, the rest of the world started catching up. For those in Winnipeg, Phantom of the Paradise is essentially a religious experience. In 2005, Winnipeg organized the first ever Phantom of the Paradise convention, Phantompalooza.

KAHAN: For the first Phantompalooza, I got in touch with the organizers beforehand and brought up some stuff to decorate the lobby so it would would look like how it did in 1974 when the film came out there in Canada. Then I took a lead role in organizing the second Phantompalooza in 2006 where we had the entire cast come.

COMANOR: They treated us like the fucking Beatles up there. I had a career in music and I did a lot of concerts, and I never got treated like I got treated in Winnipeg.

WILLIAMS: The thing about Winnipeg is they’re like past the point of being fans. They’re like family. They were crazy about it when it was this little group up in Winnipeg. They grew, they grew, they grew, they grew.

ELBLING: For us as actors, it was like “I’ll do this, and then I’ll go do Laverne and Shirley” or whatever it was. It was just another job. We had a great time, and when it didn’t do as well as everybody hoped, it just became another thing in your back pocket that you’ve done. It was when the resurgence when it was like “Oh my god. This is incredible.”

WILLIAMS: When it came out, nobody went to see it. If 100 people saw it over a period of time, maybe there were two people who went “I want to show this to everybody because it’s the best film I ever saw in my life.” They became fanatics. And out of the 100 people they showed it to, maybe 2 more people. All of a sudden, it’s got a follow. An amazing following. The amazing thing is 50 years after it came out, I’m standing onstage at the Cannes Film Festival introducing the picture to a packed beach.

KAHAN: I think it got discovered in America because people like Edgar Wright and Guillermo Del Toro are huge fans. Both he and Del Toro say that they wouldn’t be filmmakers today without Phantom of the Paradise. And I think that leads a lot of people to watch it when somebody gives it that kind of endorsement.

WILLIAMS: Edgar has probably done more for Phantom of the Paradise than anyone that did get paid. He was on Corden’s show and Corden asked “How many movies do you watch?” And he said “Sometimes three a day.” And he said “If you could only recommend one movie for the rest of your life, what would it be?” And without even thinking, he said “Phantom of the Paradise.” Edgar’s in the will.

KAHAN: Eventually, I did a restoration of the film and put back in all of the material that was removed for legal reasons right before it was released. Which Mr. De Palma and Mr. Pressman approved of and we went through the efforts of trying to get that released, but the legal issues were still in effect. So it can’t get a legitimate release, but I’ve been showing it at film festivals and one-off events.

HIRSCH: I always believed the picture was entertaining. It’s witty and the songs are great. The satire is still fresh, somehow. I never thought that it would achieve the status that it has reached now. But the release of the film is only its birth, and, surprisingly, some pictures go on to lead long and productive lives.

COMANOR: There were some beautiful things that happened. It was such a novelty to me because I wasn’t out to do film. So it was just a great gift to me that I got to do that.

ELBLING: I’ve heard from a lot of people. Obviously if you’re Robert Di Nero, then this happens all the time. But I’m not Robert DeNiro. So to have 50 year old men and women kneeling by your seat going “You have no idea what this means to me.”

WILLIAMS: I tell Phantom fans “You gave me my career. Not only because you love Phantom, but you kept it alive long enough for Daft Punk to meet at the theater and see it 20 times and then call me.” And then next thing you know, I’m standing onstage accepting the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2014 with Daft Punk. That would not have happened without Phantom.