Inside Paris’s Grand Guignol, a theatre that was once popular for its live horror/shock shows; images from Life.
Plays with plots like these were the norm:
- When a doctor finds his wife’s lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor’s brain.
- Two hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a young, pretty fellow inmate out of jealousy.
- A nanny strangles the children in her care.
- A young woman visits the man whose face she horribly disfigured with acid, where he obtains his revenge.
These were performed live, with the help of practical special effects (limited by whatever was available during the time period, but still). Non-horror plays were also performed, but these were not as popular. One of the Grand Guignol’s most famous performers, Paula Maxa, was called “the most assassinated woman in the world”, having been murdered and raped in plays thousands of times during her productive career.
The theatre began to decline in popularity during and after World War II before finally closing in 1962 after sixty-five years of operation; said its final director: “We could never equal Buchenwald.”