The Phantom of Skid Row

1965. Young Tito Scaffone loves vintage horror movies more than life itself. He is especially enamored of Lon Chaneys 1925 The Phantom of the Opera-the majesty of the sets the silent-celluloid beauty of Mary Philbin but most of all the mastery of Chaneys makeup as the hideously disfigured phantom. But monsters in movies are one thing in life quite another. And Tito cannot face life. His only friend is Jan Klosek a good-hearted South Philadelphia roughneck whose uncles run Independent Film Exchange a distribution hub for low-grade film product. Through IFE Tito is given a chance to manage the Dreamland in the Skid Row section of the city. A century old the Dreamland hangs on as an all-night movie house. It also happens to be haunted. Living alone at the theater Tito enters a world of horror more terrifying than any he has encountered in the films he so adores. The story takes place in the shadow-ridden Philadelphia that inspired David Goodis existential pulp novels David Lynchs Eraserhead. Along the way stops are made at the film domains of Rondo Hatton and Val Lewton the 50-Foot Woman and 4D man and others. But Titos journey into darkness truly begins in the pages of a lost diary kept by the theaters owner in the late 1800s. In these tortured pages Tito unmasks the true face of the Dreamlands horror.The Phantom of Skid Row is a ghost story of sorts. It is also a love letter to the magic of classic and not-so-classic movies; to the eccentric charms of film exhibition in the days before theaters became homogenized; to the mystery of love in sheltered young hearts.