Phantom of the Opera's Erik as a Feral Child: Argento's Film

Introduction: The Phantom as Outsider

"Phantom; I am a rat."
— Julian Sands as Erik

A child is born, shunned by his own mother. He is brilliant and artistic, possessing skills untouched by even the greatest masters in many areas. Perhaps he is also insane, unable to relate to the human race. Eventually, he will come to be known as a ghost, haunting the world of ordinary people as he passes in and out of sight within one of the greatest centers of musical performance in the world. Passionate, he falls in love, and in jealousy he falls even further. This plot line has the potential to be studied in depth by sociologists, psychologists, historians, and artists on many levels, exploring the child himself and the life and events that build around him.

Similar to any number of ancient myths and fairy tales, this love story about an extraordinary outsider was first introduced as Le Fantôme de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux, a French journalist in the late 1800s who happened upon bits and pieces of historical truths and superstitious rumors that were incorporated into this groundbreaking and originally underappreciated novel. Nearly a century later, after dozens of film versions of this classic tale had already populated popular and independent movie databases, one of the greatest horror movie directors of our time decided to take a new look at this haunting character.

Argento's Adaptation vs. Leroux's Novel

In 1998, Dario Argento released Il Fantasma Del l'opera, an Italian remake of the Phantom story filmed in Hungary. Not an attempt to accurately transpose Leroux's novel into film, nor a remake of any of the previous films, Argento took many liberties with the basic plot elements familiar to Phantom fans. However, Argento nonetheless stayed true to the spirit and basic artistic essence of the tale.

Argento opens his film with an abandoned child floating down the underground waterways of Paris in a basket, abandoned like the baby Moses. However, instead of being found by a loving human family — or perishing by drowning or exposure — a colony of sewer rats pulls the child to land and cares for him. This differs from Leroux's novel, where Erik (later known as The Phantom) was abandoned emotionally by his mother but remained in her home for many years, kept confined and isolated.

Another significant plot difference is introduced as well: where Leroux's Erik is born with a severe physical deformity, Argento's Erik is physically perfect, with smooth skin and flowing blonde hair, abandoned for some other unknown reason. Argento's Erik apparently grows up beneath the Paris Opera House, whereas Leroux's Erik is actually responsible for building it later in life. In both versions, however, Erik falls in love with a choir girl named Christine and pursues a relationship as her music teacher. Christine in both versions is young and innocent, torn between her dark teacher and a young aristocrat. In Leroux's version, Christine is horrified when she unmasks Erik's face to reveal his physical deformity; in Argento's film she is instead exposed to his family of rats and his unorthodox species identification. Both tellings end with Erik sacrificing his own life to give Christine the freedom she believes she wants — to be with the other man.

Erik and the Concept of the Feral Child

Erik's character has always been an outsider with minimal human contact, especially in youth, and Argento's addition of having him raised by rats is an excellent homage to the fact that this character is, at his core, a feral child. A feral child — also known as a "wild child" or "wolf child" — is one who has been raised with little or no human contact, whether through isolation and confinement or through actually having been raised by another species. While it has been speculated that Erik may have spent some time living with wolves after escaping from a freak show where he was displayed in an animal cage at a young age, Argento is the first filmmaker to portray Erik as having been genuinely raised by animals. Other tales of feral children, such as Tarzan or The Jungle Book, have captured the public imagination and helped popularize the academic study of this phenomenon.

In actuality, feral children do exist. Many hoaxes have been revealed over the years, but scientifically and academically studied and verified cases are numerous and undeniable. Confined children may have spent years locked in a basement or attic with no socialization — in one media-frenzied case, a girl was kept strapped to a potty chair for more than a decade. Isolated children are those who were abandoned and managed to survive by their own means without assistance. Animal-raised children have been found in the care of dogs, wolves, ostriches, gazelles, bears, sheep, leopards, cows, jackals, goats, chimpanzees, and monkeys. Documented cases range from children running away from home to live with packs of wild dogs on city streets, to children lost in the jungle and taken in by tree-dwelling monkeys, to adults found living in wolf dens, hunting game with their pack and running on all fours.

Human children can be raised by other animals quite successfully, growing into healthy and happy individuals. However, feral children generally do not consider themselves part of the human race and never integrate properly into human society. The character of the Phantom has always considered himself not to be human — because of his strange appearance, and possibly because his confining mother told him he was not human. It makes sense, therefore, to extend this trait to a further degree in Argento's version, having Erik consider himself not human because his companions and family have accepted him into the world of rats.

Behavioral Traits: Realism in Argento's Portrayal

Argento's Erik lives a very isolated life, choosing to remain beneath the Opera House where he builds his home. He does not seek out human companionship, although he is obviously fascinated by humans, watching them from a guarded distance. He takes great care to avoid them, running from people and setting traps and barriers to keep them far from his home. According to experts, feral children "don't learn to socialize, and don't want to socialize... By and large, feral children did not like human company and would go to great lengths to avoid it" (Ward). This is certainly true of this character.

Additionally, feral children take on the behaviors of the species that raised them. A child raised by dogs will lap water from a bowl rather than drink from a glass; a child raised by panthers will hunt and eat raw meat rather than cooked food. One feral boy raised by a certain kind of monkey had never drunk water and refused to do so even after being brought into human captivity, because the monkeys that raised him obtained all necessary water from eating juicy jungle fruits. Feral children may develop the habit of walking on all fours, which can even alter their bodies so that walking upright is never fully possible. Rather than speaking human languages, feral children learn to communicate as their companion animals do — whether that be barking, mooing, chittering, or squeaking. Many of these common developments are present in Argento's Phantom, while others are not, with varying degrees of realism associated with each.

Erik is very quiet and reserved in the rare moments when he does make human contact. Rats are not loud or boisterous animals; they are known for silence and stealth. Rats build tunnels and passages through walls to move between locations and construct their nests in holes found in the ground or in buildings. Likewise, Erik builds secret passageways throughout the Opera House and makes his home deep underground, nestled in a corner of the basement. He travels through these passages quietly and largely undetected. He shows clear signs of classic dissociation from the human race, with no sentiment for human life when none is deserved. Just as a wild animal would strike against a hunter to save its pack or defend its territory, Erik does the same — killing the malicious rat catchers who wander the Opera House basements, and killing others who come too close to his home and might expose his family to danger.

"Feral children had little or no emotional control, and several would be subject to sudden fits of anger, made worse by the fact that they could exhibit particularly fierce or wild behavior. Some children were reported as having occasional fits of ferocity" (Ward), which is very accurate to the Phantom's character. It is known that blind children develop particularly acute hearing, and deaf children develop better eyesight; similarly, feral children raised in animal packs develop keener senses through the stimuli they encounter. Erik is shown to possess uncommon grace and extremely keen eyesight and hearing — both traits that would be found in rats.

Conclusion: The Feral Phantom

Dario Argento has played up the fairy-tale nature of the infamous Phantom of the Opera, removing many traditional elements of the story — such as Erik's facial deformity — while focusing on the real essence of this legend. Erik has always been a feral child: in Leroux's original, of the isolated and confined variety; in Argento's telling, one actually raised by animals. While there are no documented incidents of human infants being raised by rats, there are countless examples of similar experiences with other species. Rats have the intelligence and capability to respond to such a situation in a manner comparable to other caregiving animals, and while it is fantastical and improbable that this would occur, it is not impossible.

Erik portrays many of the common behavioral traits of feral children — among them a fear of humans and the life choices that flow from that fear. While one could argue that some of his less feral behaviors might be plausible in theory, other aspects of his character are clearly less authentic to documented feral child behavior. The end of the film, where the misunderstood Phantom dies after being discovered by humans, is actually one of the most tragically true-to-life elements of the story — for in the vast majority of documented cases, any feral child discovered and pursued by humans winds up dead soon thereafter.

Bibliography

Argento, Dario. Il Fantasma Del l'opera / The Phantom of the Opera. 1998.

Leroux, Gaston. Le Fantôme de l'Opéra / The Phantom of the Opera. 1906/1911.

PETA. "The Hidden Life of Mice and Rats." Stop Animal Tests. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. http://www.stopanimaltests.com/feat/hiddenrats/

Ward, Andrew. Feral Children: Isolated, Confined, Wolf, and Wild Children. 2004. http://www.feralchildren.com