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Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was a theatre in the Pigalle district of Paris which, in its heyday between 1897 until 1962, was the hugely popular venue to watch extremely naturalistic live horror shows.
The Grand Guignol’s founder and original director Oscar Méténier wanted to create a home for plays about a class of people who were not considered appropriate subjects in other venues: prostitutes, criminals, street urchins and others at the lower end of Paris's social echelon.
Given the hard lives of the Parisian underclass these stories naturally gravitated towards violence, and soon the violence itself became the spectacle that drew the crowds.
Patrons would see five or six short plays, varying in brutality and often interspersed with lighter
Patrons would see five or six short plays, varying in brutality and often interspersed with lighter
comedic horror. But the most popular and best known were the bleakest and most gory; the very best special effects of the day could be found at the Grand Guignol. The best loved plays explored insanity, depravity and passions of the spirit.
In one a vengeful brain surgeon performs horrific surgery on his wife’s lover who, rendered mad by the operation, hammers a chisel into the doctor’s own brain.
In others two old hags in a debtor’s prison blind a pretty young fellow inmate in jealousy, a man is horribly disfigured with acid and a nanny takes pleasure in slitting the throats of the children in her care.
The theatre judged the success of a performance by the number of patrons who passed out from shock; the average was two faintings each evening.
Paula Maxa was one of the Grand Guignol's most adored performers.
Paula Maxa was one of the Grand Guignol's most adored performers.
From 1917 to the 1930s Maxa was murdered on stage more than 10,000 times, earning the legend ‘the most assassinated woman in the world.’
Audiences waned in the years following World War II, and the Grand Guignol closed its doors in 1962.
Audiences waned in the years following World War II, and the Grand Guignol closed its doors in 1962.
Management attributed the closure in part to the fact that the theatre's faux horrors had been eclipsed by the actual events of the Holocaust two decades earlier.
But the Grand Guignol lives on in language; it is used as a descriptive term for the genre of graphic, amoral horror entertainment, especially in Jacobean theatre, as well as the 20th century’s slasher films.
