Obsession is often considered to be humanity’s cruelest way of showing undying love. Whether it be following your loved one, even until death, or kidnapping them and hoping they’d love you, it’s this very behavior that many of us will find creepy, and some others, romantic, and many still, annoying. However, when we hear about a story like that, we can’t help but become just a little curious. Who was the stalker? What’d the victim do? It’s also easy for us to romanticize the act into some sort of gothic tragedy. The Phantom of the Opera is an example of this.

The Phantom of the Opera tells the story of Christine Daaé, an opera singer who meets her childhood playmate, Raoul de Chagny. Raoul decides to go backstage to meet with Christine. However, he hears someone in the room with her. When he later asks her about this, Christine simply says she is being mentored by a man called the “Angel of Music”, a man that her father had once told her about. After a series of frightening events, Christine finally meets her angel who was behind these gruesome instances, an angel that turns out to be a deformed man called Erik. Afraid that she’d leave him, Erik kidnaps her, only to release her later on the condition that she’d be faithful to him. Christine promptly tells Raoul of her situation, and while she doesn’t enjoy the situation she’s in, she can’t help but sympathize with Erik. It culminates in a night where both Christine and Raoul must flee from Erik and find their own happy ending. Erik, on the other hand, is tragically killed, knowing full well that he will die from love.

Erik, better known as the Phantom, was a particularly interesting character. He was described as lipless, with sunken eyes and a death-like face. He was born with that deformity, and because of his ugliness, not even his own mother would kiss him. It made his attachment to Christine all the more evident, simply because she was one of the first to actually show him a shred of human compassion. She was the light of his life, for lack of better words, and when she leaves, he couldn’t bear to live without her. In a sense, he was a victim of his own heart. Christine, on the other hand, was just as complex. She had started to sympathize with her captor, not to mention the fact that she considered him to be her “Angel of Music.” What’s more, though she was born of light, she was attracted to the darkness, and showed love for a creature where no love had actually existed before. In the middle is Raoul, who managed to rescue Christine back to what I can only describe to be a fairy tale life, one that Christine could thrive in.

Not only this, but The Phantom of the Opera had become so popular that it’d been adapted many times over. But despite this, there is still a haunting presence within this tale, a quality that possesses the same tainted darkness other writers have commanded for many centuries. It alone provided a bittersweet lullaby for which readers cast aside their happily ever after.