A Frighteningly Fun Project

Greetings, Phans!

Well, I finished my latest semester of college, and this was an especially fun one for me. One of the main reasons why is because I took a class on horror literature. In that class, we studied some well-known and influential works of horror, from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (widely considered to be the first Gothic novel), through the famous ones like Stoker's Dracula and Shelley's Frankenstein, up to modern works like Stephen King's The Shining, and even some urban legends dealing with ghosts or spirits encountering people in Hawaii.

POTO, sadly, wasn't a part of the curriculum. However, for an end-of-semester project, all the students got to give PowerPoint presentations on the horror-related subject of our choice. No prizes for guessing what I picked. I presented a very brief history of POTO, from the novel to the many film and stage versions. It had to be brief, since every student had a 10-minute time limit for presenting.

I think the presentation went pretty well; my professor congratulated me on researching my subject so extensively. (I neglected to mention that most of that research had been done for fun, long before the project was assigned.) Also, I found out that one of my classmates had been in the technical crew for Palikū Theatre's production last fall. She shared some secrets, including the fact that the makeup designers were originally going to try an even more horrific disfigurement for the Phantom but couldn't get it to look right, so they settled for the "leprosy" look I described in my reviews (which, in my opinion, was still very effective).

A lot of the other students' presentations were also great fun. There were slideshows on just about every random horror-related topic you could imagine, from The Exorcist to doppelgängers. And now, the semester's over, and I'm preparing for a summer vacation that just might be even more epic than my last one.

Feel free to comment if you found ways to bring POTO into some of your school projects in the past! (I will say that this presentation certainly wasn't the first time that the Phantom's tale has found its way into my schoolwork. I even referenced the story in my SAT exam once, and from what I can recall, I got a pretty respectable score for it. Yay, I suppose!)


I remain your obedient servant,
I.A.E.