The Grand Guignol Theater: A Parisian Nightmare
Good evening! All my creatures of the night. If you are reading this blog, be warned of the terrors which lay ahead, but I thank you for returning to my.. well…infrequent blog posts. Tonight, I will continue my series: Horror History. I know, I know. My last post said I would be writing about Nickelodeon Nightmares. I am sorry to disappoint all of you nickel and dime nightmare lovers out there, but I did warn I would be jumping around privy to my fancy.
Nonetheless, tonight’s topic follows chronologically from my previous post and before the Nickelodeon Nightmares. We journey over the Atlantic to the ancient country of France.
Positioned in the cramped Montmartre district of Paris lays the Grand Guignol Theater – one of the most unique and bizarre theaters in history. The Grand Guignol Theater – Le Theatre du Grand Guignol – staged hundreds of one-act plays devoted to the tales of terror, macabre, delusion, mutilation, and murder.
Now, don’t be confused with the Giallo horror genre associated with Dario Argento. Those horror works are Italian and came in the form of either film or novel. The Grand Guignol Theater is French and took the stage with a vengeance!
The major attraction of the Grand Guignol Theater was the shockingly graphic eviscerations, stabbings, beheadings, electrocutions, rapes, hangings, and other heinous acts. The sadistic and bloody – bloody good– plays were produced from 1897 until the theater closed in 1962. The Grand Guignol Theater is a lesser known name (unless you happen to produce a horror podcast), but it established important precedents for horror entertainment that took the cinema decades to match. Today, the term grand guignol is still commonly used to describe particularly graphic horror in the arts.
Under the guidance of Max Maurey – the second, but most important owner of the Grand Guignol Theater – the theater’s fame and reputation spread far and wide garnering international acclaim. Celebrities and royalty alike came in droves to witness the bloodbaths and artistic death the Grand Guignol Theater offered.
The theater first opened its doors under playwright Oscar Metenier. He had developed the Theatre Libre in the 1880s, an experimental theater catering to lower-class patrons that produced rosse (crass) plays set in the dark slums of the Parisian nightlife. The rosse plays were often based on tabloid newspaper reports called faits divers – brief items reporting lurid accounts of violent and unusual occurrences. These plays ushered in a naturalistic aesthetic. The popular melodramas of the time depicted innocent lower-class people victimized by ruthless upper-class villains, but which typically ended in happy endings. On the other hand, the rosse plays featured darkly ironic conclusions that not only mocked the middle-class life, but flaunted the triumph of injustice, cruelty, and lust. If you could surmise, these unsettling dramas proved to annoy the critics and pundits of the establishment.
Metenier took the name of the theater from the medieval puppet character called Guignol, a rough peasant depicted in violent, slapstick comedies. The term “guignol” became synonymous for puppet shows of all kinds. Thus, Metenier’s theater as “grand” would be large guignols plays aimed at adult audiences and featuring live performers. As an attempt to maximize emotional manipulation of the audience during the evening’s play, the terror plays would alternate comedy. The technique was referred to as hot and cold showers.
The success of Max Maurey’s odd theater was due in part to his keen handling of the publicity. Reports of patrons vomiting or fainting during performances were prominent in popular press accounts and in word-of-mouth lore of the theater. For example, the gouging out or cutting of eyes is still rarely enacted in modern horror films, but was a common staple in the Grand Guignol Theater. Some Guignol plays ended with rough poetic justice, but others seemingly staged the narrative as an excuse for shock effects. Several plays utilized intricate effects as facial disfigurement, burnings, and torture.
The most prominent figure associated with the Grand Guignol Theater was Andre de Lorde. He wrote and co-wrote over one hundred plays for the theater – many being the theater’s most famous plays. “The Dead Child” (1918) concerns a man who discovers that, in his absence, his wife has left him for another man and abandoned their baby to die. The father steals the baby’s bones, hair, and nails from the grave and creates a wax mannequin of the child, forcing his wife to cradle it in her arms before he strangles her. Yikes.
De Lorde’s “At the Telephone” (1902) was written with Charles Foley and contains no visceral effects, but was one of the Grand Guignol Theater’s most influential plays. This play was adapted to the screen and the film by several different artists including D.W. Griffth’s “The Lonely Villa” (1909). In De Lorde’s “At the Telephone,” a prosperous business man has moved to a household in the country (Does this plot sound familiar?). On a stormy night, he leaves on business to stay with some friends and receives frantic calls from his wife. He can hear people breaking into the house. He must listen in arrested terror as the burglars strangle his wife, child, and elderly servant
In contrast, Griffth’s film highlights the family being saved when the good guys bursts in and subdues the attackers. Here he comes to save the day!!! The contrast between these two depictions are instructive in their respective treatments of class distinctions as well as traditional morality. The primarily working-class patrons of the Grand Guignol Theater could be horrified but perhaps secretly thrilled the bourgeois gentleman pays for an elegant evening with the lives of his loved ones. One version is a melodramatic suspense that affirms dominant values; the other a horror vignette that thwarts those very assumptions.
With that, I will start to wrap up this long-winding history lesson. The Grand Guignol Theater made a certain impact on the horror film, though it’s influence was not immediate or direct. Evidence of exchanges between theater and film began to appear in De Lorde’s 1925 adaptation of the seminal horror film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” The Grand Guignol’s method of intense visceral shocks and disturbing amorality would not be fully adopted by Hollywood horror films until after the end of formal censorship in 1968.
Please stay tuned for my next blog. I will finally address the highly anticipated Nickelodeon Nightmares. Until next time, I remain in the shadows.