Plot Summary:A one-person piece for the 'man with a thousand faces.' Silent horror film icon Lon Chaney was the son of deaf-mute parents, and thus, already as a child, perfected pantomime. He rose to fame as a master of disguise with a penchant for grotesque appearances and torturous contortions. Norbert Pfaffenbichler has remounted the forty-six preserved films of the two hundred that Chaney made into a tribute in A Messenger From The Shadows. A tribute to Chaney's art, to the uncanny power of the horror film, and to the paradoxical enchantment of cinema: Notes on Film 06.
Actor Lon Chaney is an iconic figure of the silent horror. He played Quasimodo and the eponymous lead in The Phantom of the Opera, and he also appeared in ten films directed by Tod Browning. This imaginative hour-long compilation of excerpts from his surviving works offers a new take on early films and comes with an unsettling soundtrack from Bernhard Lang.