Frank Wedekind wrote the 1904 play Pandora’s Box, which helped inspire the film’s Lulu story.
Wedekind’s play is the second part of the Lulu cycle, following Earth Spirit. Together, the dramas depict Lulu as a compelling, sexually independent figure whose relationships produce social conflict, jealousy, and violence. The plays were controversial because of their frank treatment of sexuality and their criticism of bourgeois morality.
Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box adapts material from both Lulu plays, with Louise Brooks giving the best-known screen performance of the character. The film is therefore connected to the Pandora title through Wedekind’s literary work, not through a literal retelling of Hesiod’s Greek myth.
Wedekind was a German playwright, poet, and actor associated with modernist and expressionist currents in European theater. His Lulu character later influenced Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, although Berg’s opera is an adaptation of Wedekind’s plays rather than a version of the ancient Pandora legend.