Other elements of Fantômas that the Surrealists enjoyed include the fact that the city of Paris, where most of the adventures unfold, is truqué – “rigged” or “loaded” – in favour of Fantômas by a system of “objective chance”; in connection with this, the way that authors Allain and Souvestre constructed the Fantômas novels – each writing an alternate chapter at great speed and then meeting to patch it all together – can be said to recall the Surrealist chance-game of cadavre exquis.[6]

Of all the Surrealists, the two who engaged most with Fantômas appear to be René Magritte, in particular, and Robert Desnos. In his paintings, Magritte evoked the iconography of the serial on several occasions; one of the most famous is Le Barbare (1928), showing the masked face of Fantômas fading in and out of a brick wall. Other Magritte paintings take their cue directly from the Louis Feuillade film adaptations;[7] L’Homme du Large (1926) reproduces the final scene from Juve Contre Fantômas (1913), in which the arch-assassin’s arms are flung high in triumph after blowing up his enemies, whilst also from 1926 is L’Assassin Menacé, which recreates a frame from the third serial, Le Mort Qui Tue (1913), where two street-thugs lie in wait for their victim on either side of a doorway. Other canvases by Magritte of the same period seem to take their cue from the original book covers – both La Traversée Difficile (1926) and Le Musée d'une Nuit (1927) prominently feature severed hands, as on the cover for La Main Coupée. The later Le Retour de Flamme (1943) is a virtual facsimile of the original cover for the first novel in the series, except that in Magritte's painting Fantômas grasps a flower instead of a dagger.

Magritte also wrote several texts featuring Fantômas; the following were published in the journal Distances in March, 1928:

A THEATRICAL EVENT.

Juve has been on the trail of Fantômas for quite some time.

He crawls along the broken cobblestones of a mysterious passage. To guide himself he gropes along the walls with his fingers. Suddenly, a whiff of hot air hits him in the face. He comes nearer... His eyes adjust to the darkness. Juve distinguishes a door with loose boards a few feet in front of him. He undoes his overcoat in order to wrap it around his left arm, and gets his revolver ready. As soon as he has cleared the door, Juve realizes that his precautions were unnecessary: Fantômas is close by, sleeping deeply. In a matter of seconds Juve has tied up the sleeper. Fantômas continues to dream – of his disguises, perhaps, as usual.