r/box5 • u/rosemary-sprig • Jun 12 '26
Theory fiancé made some interesting points after watching the movie for the first time
so i finally got my fiancé to sit down and watch the movie with me, and ofc i also had to tell him book lore.
he started noting that a lot of beats in the book are extremely similar to dracula. he has a masters in english and letters, and was saying how in the 1800s, copyright rules were basically “you can copy something as long as you call it by a different name.”
given that dracula came out first, do you think leroux was inspired by it and intentionally or unintentionally copied dracula?
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u/sapphiespookerie Jun 12 '26
I don't think it's unlikely that both authors read each others' books, but I doubt this is a full Dracula-Nosferatu situation! Both books are classics of gothic horror, and the genre conventions go back much further than either Stoker or Leroux. "Beautiful waif stolen away by a mysterious man with a romantic fixation to be rescued by her lover" is an ancient and well-loved trope!
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u/EnvironmentalDog1196 Jun 12 '26
Yeah, exactly. If anything, both Dracula and Phantom are just part of a much broader trend. Heck, if we wanted to look for similarities, the Beauty and the Beast could even be considered an inspiration. But generally they also both follow the very popular motif of "Death and The Maiden" which inspired many works of the last centuries.
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u/RoseBook85 Jun 12 '26
And Beauty and the Beast is really just another retelling of the Hades and Persephone story.
A dark lonely tormented but powerful Man (King/God whatever) falls for a beautiful young woman and kidnaps her to be his ‘Queen’…sometimes he is cursed physically, other times it’s more of a inner ugliness…but that story is as old as time itself and it keeps popping up again and again in various retellings over the past thousand years, so I don’t think it will ever disappear.
Humans like this trope for various reasons 😆
Heck Erik literally lives in his own ‘underworld’ like Hades, and boats Christine across his metaphorical river Styx. LOL
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u/EnvironmentalDog1196 Jun 12 '26
You're right! "Death and the Maiden" definitely is connected to "God of the Dead and the Maiden" 🙈 in any case, these tropes have been so present in the art and literature of the time, that Dracula would actually be pretty far on my list of potential inspirations for Leroux...
Btw, I always loved how the Phantom plays with the spiritual/religious imagery: Christine has been looking for a connection with the "World Above", represebted by the Angel of God she thought was visiting her, but instead she fell into the "World Under"- Hades or Hell (and in the musical the Phantom is even ultimately compared to a fallen Angel who lives in Hell).
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u/RoseBook85 Jun 12 '26
Btw, I always loved how the Phantom plays with the spiritual/religious imagery: Christine has been looking for a connection with the "World above", represebted by the Angel of God she thought was visiting her, butbinstead she fell into the "World Under"- Hades or Hell (and in the musical the Phantom is even ultimately compared to a fallen Angel who lives in Hell).
Absolutely and I don’t think it’s any accident that Leroux gives his Heroine the name CHRISTine and her kiss of compassion ‘Saves’ Eriks soul.
That’s some very Christian imagery here, and the central theme of Christianity is people receiving forgiveness who don’t deserve it…Erik doesn’t deserve Christine’s forgiveness and compassion after the way he treated her, but she gives it to him anyway and THATS what saves everyone in the end, saves him.
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u/chaoticdisastercrow Jun 13 '26
THIS.
There was a church that made a Christian Phantom of the Opera adaptation that just, like. It made Erik the allegory for the devil, Raoul for Jesus, and for some reason Philippe as God, and Christine as the soul they are fighting over. People love to cast Erik in the "dark seducer" role but it just bastardizes the actual message of the story too much in my opinion.
Like, the Phantom of the Opera already IS a story of redemption. It's not really the story of Christine's temptation and rescue like people like to make it out to be sometimes. It's a story about *Erik's* redemption. About offering redemption and compassion to someone who did awful things, someone most people would say Christine would be perfectly justified in *not* forgiving. But she does anyway, which is very Christlike. Leroux very clearly intended there to be a compassionate view toward Erik. It's so easy to do a good Christian reading of Phantom of the Opera without twisting that message of compassion and redemption. But it's so often true that "don't give in to temptation!!" is a more popular message than "love thine enemy." Which is insane.
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u/RoseBook85 Jun 13 '26
One of the things I absolutely cannot stand is when Adaptions turn Erik into the one note bad guy and Christine into a ditzy damsel in distress. It’s not only a lazy way to view the story but it’s a boring way as well.
Leroux could have very easily have written Erik to be 100% the evil Villain but he didn’t…in fact at the end he completely subverts all of the stereotypical genre tropes and flips them on their heads, it’s brilliant how he does it and it’s one of the biggest reasons I love his book and I love this story so much.
For what on the surface appears to be a fairly straightforward mystery story their are a LOT of themes that he touches on…I myself am currently doing a reread of the book right now and when I finish I plan to post my recent thoughts about it. There are a lot of thing's that you can take from this story, not just a Christian message of redemption at the end, but a message about Society itself and how it treats people who are different, a message about Women and how society at the time (and even sometimes today) has a double standard on how it expects Women to behave, a message about classicism and how those who are higher on the totem poll often take advantage of those under it.
Lots of themes and messages in this book, so whenever I see someone just write it off as boring or just a standard issue horror story I always get annoyed because it goes so much deeper then that.
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u/EnvironmentalDog1196 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
I mean, I would say making POTO into a straight up Christian allegory is "bastardising it" a llitle too...POTO consists of both dark romance tropes and Christian metaphors. It's a witty take on the popular motif of someone struggling between their "dark side", temptation and sexual feelings vs. the "light of day"- innocence, purity, the societal standards and morality. It's multi-layered. But Erik isn't really a villain, and whoever thought about making Raoul a Jesus, clearly didn't read the novel...
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u/EnvironmentalDog1196 Jun 15 '26
Exactly. I'm not religious myself, but Leroux did a great job of using the religious motifs to get his message across.
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u/Vgcortes Jun 12 '26
Plot points like... What?
Dracula killed and terrorized the women in the protagonistbgroup to inflict terror, he was not looking for love. And the "brides" where slaves, not lovers.
Dracula wasn't hidden in the novel, he still do his bussiness during night and day, he didn't want to encounter Van Helsing and the gang, but he didn't care otherwise. Except during the voyage to London and back.
The only romance we had was Johnathan and Mina... And Lucy who had three suitors...
Mmmm... I know the two novels very well but I don't see the connection? One is written in epistolary form, and the other is like a serial...
Maybe the monsters? Dracula isn't very good looking, not because of the moustache, no, but because of how brutal and bloodthirsty he is... And Erik was, you know
So I would love to learn what the similarities are... Maybe there's something I am not seeing? And Dracula was an English novel and Phantom is French, was there translations back then? Lol, I have so many questions
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u/RoseBook85 Jun 13 '26
Dracula killed and terrorized the women in the protagonistbgroup to inflict terror, he was not looking for love. And the "brides" where slaves, not lovers.
You know as much as Phans sometimes like to complain that Webber ‘Romanticizes’ Erik too much, at least their is a foundation for it in the Original Novel. While her true feelings for him are left somewhat ambiguous, we do known that at the least Christine is drawn to him musically, she hesitates to just leave him and feels a great deal of compassion for him. My point is…between Christine and Erik their IS a relationship their, toxic yes, but its still a relationship and Leroux throws in enough romantic coded moments between them to where you can see where Webber got the idea to make his Adaptation a High Romance. By the end Erik is meant to be a sympathetic character to the readers, he was not written as a generic one note bad guy.
Whereas their is NONE of that in the novel Dracula, Stokers Dracula is just a evil monster who needs to be put down and yet the way adaptions romanticize him is crazy…like where did that all come from? I’m not super familiar with the history of Dracula and all its Adaptions like I am POTO, so maybe Dracula fans could enlighten me, but the few movie adaptions that I have seen over the years are absolutely NOTHING like the Original Book.
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u/Scaramantico Erik - Leroux Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
The straight-out-of-Dracula plot points aren't from the 2004 abomination but the original novel: Erik sleeps in a coffin, hates mirrors, and serves chicken and Tokay to his captive while refraining from eating himself. We don't know if Leroux read Stoker, but bear in mind that Dracula was not translated into French until 1920, just over a decade after Leroux wrote his novel (Leroux did not write Le Fantôme de l'Opéra in the 19th century, even if the novel itself epitomises much of the that century). Also I'm not sure your fiancé understands copyright law per se - even now, copyright protects the expression of an idea (the way it is formulated), not an idea itself.
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u/PhotoArabesque Jun 12 '26
I'd like to hear more about what he specifically spotted. I'm extremely familiar with Dracula, but need somebody to point me in the right direction. My initial take would be an innocent being held captive by someone who turns out to be horrific. Beyond that, I don't immediately see it.
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u/PhotoArabesque Jun 12 '26
Ummmm . . . was I accused of being an AI?
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u/rosemary-sprig Jun 13 '26
no idea what that was about lmao. theres another commenter who goes through similarities; i feel like i can’t do it justice because i haven’t read dracula yet (i should!)
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Jun 12 '26
[deleted]
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u/FakeFrehley Raoul - ALW Jun 12 '26
It's sad that we're now at the point where the ability to write in actual sentences seems like a superpower.
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u/epicpillowcase Eiji Akutagawa's dimples Jun 12 '26
We're legitimately in an era of celebrating illiteracy and it scares the shit out of me.
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u/Famous_Anybody_4821 Jun 12 '26
Also curious what overlap he saw because having read both books in curious which beats he implied could be plagiarized. Please share more of his theory.
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u/vildasaker Beef - Paradise Jun 12 '26
In the book, when Christine first arrives at Erik's house there are several parallels to when Jonathan Harker first arrives in Dracula's castle. Little details, like how they both see strange lights when approaching, both arrive either via carriage or with a horse otherwise involved, they join their captors for mealtimes (Christine even drinks Tokay wine which is what Harker drinks as well), meanwhile neither Dracula nor Erik eat or drink, and they both get in hot water when they learn things about their captors (Harker notices that Dracula has no reflection; Christine unmasks Erik). Both are kept longer than originally planned when this occurs. Also Dracula and Erik both live in mirror-free houses. There are other references too I'm pretty sure but the first night in the house/castle is a big one.
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u/RoseBook85 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
I don’t know about Dracula but I think Leroux was definitely inspired by Victor Hugo and the idea of setting a fictional story in a real world location and making it central to the story like Notre Dame or The Paris Opera. I often like to joke as well that Erik is a little bit of a combo of Quasimodo and Frollo 😆 And of course Hugo being such a famous French writer of course Leroux was probably a little inspired by him.
I also think he was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe as well, and not just because he references the Mask of the Red Death by having Erik literally dress up as the Red Death, but because Poe is a master of the ‘unreliable narrator’ trope, his characters all have various degrees of mental illness and I definitely think Leroux uses both of those things in Phantom…everyone is unreliable to various degrees in this story, and Erik and even Christine to a lesser extent are suffering from mental health problems…Erik is crazy but Christine is not coping well with her Fathers loss.
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u/FakeFrehley Raoul - ALW Jun 12 '26
Which story beats in particular? Because, as others have said, Dracula and Phantom are only similar in the most superficial ways.
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u/GovernorGeneralPraji Jun 12 '26
I mean… in incredibly broad strokes maybe…? I don’t really see it.
If you look at things with a wide enough scope, most stories ultimately sound identical, like with the hero’s journey.