The Grand Guig­nol was a the­ater in the Pigalle dis­trict, the seamy under­belly of Paris. The theater’s focus var­ied slightly with shifts in man­age­ment, but the sub­ject mat­ter of its short plays invari­ably involved hor­ror, sex and mad­ness. Come­dies were inter­spersed between the dra­mas to release some of the ten­sion. Dur­ing its hey­day in the early 1900s, women sup­pos­edly fainted at every performance.

From its begin­nings in turn-of-the-century Paris and through­out its sixty-year reign of ter­ror, the The­atre of the Grand Guig­nol glee­fully cel­e­brated hor­ror and fear. Inno­cent vic­tims, man­gled beauty, insan­ity, muti­la­tion, deprav­ity, and guilt were its pri­mary themes. By dis­sect­ing pri­mal taboos in an unprece­dent­edly graphic man­ner, it became the prog­en­i­tor of all the blood-spilling, eye-gouging, and limb-hacking “splat­ter” movies of today.

In 1897, the French play­wright and police employee who spent the last moments with pris­on­ers sen­tenced to death, Oscar Mete­nier, bought a the­ater at the end of the impasse Chap­tal, a cul-de-sac in Paris’ Pigalle dis­trict, in which to pro­duce his con­tro­ver­sial nat­u­ral­ist plays. The small­est the­ater in Paris, it was also the most atyp­i­cal. Two large angels hung above the orches­tra and the theater’s neogothic wood pan­el­ing; and the boxes, with their iron rail­ings, looked like con­fes­sion­als (the build­ing had, in fact, once been a chapel).

The The­atre du Grand-Guignol–which means lit­er­ally the “big pup­pet show”–took its name from the pop­u­lar French pup­pet char­ac­ter Guig­nol, whose orig­i­nal incar­na­tion was as an out­spo­ken social commentator–a spokesper­son for the canuts, or silk work­ers, of Lyon. Early Guig­nol pup­pet shows were fre­quently cen­sored by Napoleon III’s police force.

In the fol­low­ing video, Mel Gor­don, who wrote the book “The Grand Guig­nol: The The­atre of Fear and Terror” gives us a brief expla­na­tion of what it was and what it meant to soci­ety and the world.

Oscar Mete­nier was him­self a fre­quent tar­get of cen­sor­ship for hav­ing the audac­ity to depict a milieu which had never before appeared on stage–that of vagrants, street kids, pros­ti­tutes, crim­i­nals, and “apaches,” as street loafers and con artists were called at the time–and more­over for allow­ing those char­ac­ters to express them­selves in their own language.

One of the Grand-Guignol’s first plays, Metenier’s Made­moi­selle Fifi (based on the novel by Guy de Mau­pas­sant), which was tem­porar­ily shut down by police cen­sors, pre­sented the first pros­ti­tute on stage; his sub­se­quent play, Lui!, united a whore and a crim­i­nal in the enclosed space of a hotel room. Mete­nier was Guig­nol grown up, or grandi… The The­atre du Grand-Guignol was an imme­di­ate suc­cess. With­out real­iz­ing it, Mete­nier had laid the first stone in the edi­fice of the Grand-Guignol reper­toire, which was to last for over half a cen­tury. Lit­tle by lit­tle and almost acci­den­tally, a new genre was born.

There is a lot more to say about the The Grand Guig­nol, but for now let me leave you with the fol­low­ing video. It is a trailer of ‘The The­atre Bizarre’ a mod­ern trib­ute to Grand Guig­nol fea­tur­ing cult film icon Udo Kier and films by direc­tors Dou­glas Buck, Buddy Giov­inazzo, Karim Hus­sain, Jeremy Kas­ten Tom Savini & Richard Stan­ley. Enjoy!