In silent films, makeup was a primary tool for conveying emotions. Heavy, distinct makeup allowed actors to create clear, memorable characters; it was the key element of visual storytelling, helping to define a character’s personality and role within the narrative for the audience. This paper talks about the use of makeup as prosthetics in the 1923 silent film, Hunchback of Notre Dame, directed by Wallace Worsley and produced by Carl Laemmle and Irving Thalberg, and the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Rupert Julian, with supplemental direction from Edward Sedgwick. In both of these silent films, actor Lon Chaney developed a famously painful and grotesque self-applied makeup to transform into the character of disabled Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Erik in The Phantom of the Opera.
Twinkle Dalal (Tue,) studied this question.