There is a legend about Paris’s gruesome Théâtre du Grand Guignol which testifies to the squeamish, macabre nature of its horror plays and bloody special effects. According to a 1957 article in The New York Times, it had been quite common for audience members to faint from shock during performances (with the faintings averaging about two per night, in the prewar days). During one performance, when a man watching the incumbent ghastly horror play did faint, the in-house doctor was sent for. However, no doctor could be found. When the unconscious man came to, the Théâtre employees apologized for their inability to locate their resident physician. The man explained wearily, “I am the doctor.”
The Grand Guignol, which operated from 1897 to 1962, was a theatrical institution that put on a variety of short, 
provocative plays: two vicious, brutal horror pageants involving bloody maiming and murder, and then two extremely silly comic shows. The alternating horror and comedy pattern was referred to as a douche écossaise (a “hot and cold shower)”. The two formats worked in tandem: winding the audience up and then wringing them out. But the Grand Guignol is really only remembered for its horror component: disguising, bloody, and nearly unrelenting violence. It was committed to the kind of extreme butchery that would deeply shock audiences—making them faint, scream, or panic and insist to those around them that the events onstage had actually been real. Despite its obvious artificial confines, the Grand Guignol sought convincing spectacle: daggers, when thrust into the body of onstage actors, would truly appear come out the other side and blood would squirt uncontrollably. Liquid blood was mixed in a variety of shades, a more vibrant red for fresh wounds, and a browner color for dried stains.
Despite its enthusiasm for horror, the Théâtre du Grand Guignol did not start as a venue for that kind of entertainment. Established in Paris’s Pigalle district by the Théâtre Libre associate Oscar Méténier in April 1897, it began with naturalist ambitions. This does not mean that the plays Méténier had chosen for production at his new Théâtre were not considered shocking or sensationalistic. Méténier, a former police secretary before his career as a writer and theatre impresario, was more interested in emphatically emphasizing what he had witnessed on the job: the plight of the working classes and the real struggles of Parisian low-life—and he represented this gritty suffering as vividly as possible, onstage, often to the denunciation of the critics. The Théâtre Libre was a private theatre, and therefore free from censorship, but according to scholars Daniel Gerould, Méténier’s play La Famille was forbidden from public performance elsewhere._
Before the Grand Guignol, he produced and wrote plays in this vein for the Théâtre Libre, experimenting with creative decisions intended to both astonish audiences and scathingly criticize the system. His play La Casserole (Stool-Pigeon), performed at the Théâtre Libre in 1889, was “a violent story of betrayal and murder among prostitutes and pimps at a cheap dance hall.” The audience was enormous, intrigued by showman André Antoine’s warning that viewers with weak constitutions should leave before La Casserole began. The show was a commercial success. Méténier had found success turning popular naturalism into shocking spectacle a decade before the Théâtre de Grand Guignol opened its doors.
When Théâtre de Grand Guignol did open, it did not deviate from many theatrical precedents established by its ancestor. Opening night, April 13th, 1897, the theatre played eight short works, including an stage adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Mademoiselle Fifi, a story of daily life in a whorehouse during the Franco-Prussian War, and La Brême, the story of a girl who joins her sister as a prostitute to ensure the financial well-being of her parents. Naturalism had, at the time of the Théâtre de Grand Guignol’s establishment, ceased to be a peripheral intellectual and artistic movement, becoming instead a full-fledged fad. Writes Gerould of this transformation: “Many of its motifs and techniques started to filter down into the popular arts and general consciousness. By the early 1890s, themes of low-life achieved wide popularity in the graphic arts of poster and lithograph as well as in the fusion of music and poetry in song.” When Méténier operated the Théâtre de Grand Guignol he produced new works in this sensationally naturalist vein, as well as replaying popular classics from the Théâtre Libre. But then, for reasons that are still unknown, Méténier transferred ownership over to a man named Max Maurey, whose leadership soon led it away from the shadow of the Théâtre Libre towards a new genre entirely: horror.
Horror at the Théâtre de Grand Guignol, though, was still rooted in a naturalist tradition. Although Méténier’s particular naturalism had been notably scandalous, it had a sociological commitment to representing true hypocrisies of life under capitalism, emphasizing the plights of the working class. Maurey’s iteration of the Théâtre de Grand Guignol employs the plots of Méténier’s plays as formulas to which other shocking, gory aspects could be added. It is through Maurey that the Théâtre’s realistic ambitions were further unified with a commitment to remaining popular and innovative to its enthusiastic and a thus-far unflappable audience.
Under Maurey, although the plots of various plays still demonstrated the exploitation of innocent working class individuals, the Théâtre de Grand Guignol grew distant Théâtre Libre, drawing inspiration, in terms of performance style, from melodrama.
‘Torture has been forbidden since King Louis XVI,’ says a character in a Grand Guignol Classic. ‘Too Bad!’ is the reply.”Scholars Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson are quick to note, in their history of the Théâtre, that ‘naturalism’ and ‘melodrama,’ while doubtlessly relying on similar source material, are extremely different. “Whereas melodrama produced plays of sentimental and sermonizing morality in a world where the righteous who suffered misery and poverty were rewarded in Heaven,” they explain, “naturalism was a far more radical doctrine, in which bourgeois society was blamed for the brutalization of humankind.” The incorporation of melodrama allows for the emphasizing of a naturalistic story (featuring, for example, realistic settings indicative of the working class’s exploitation by the bourgeoisie), while also stressing the highly representational nature of the drama.
Melodrama, itself, had its heyday in the early to mid-nineteenth century, but the preservation of many elements in Grand Guignol theatre is potentially evidence of long-lasting internal political uneasiness. The rise of English melodrama, similarly, was influenced, in part, by the actual corruption of the bourgeoisie. Conversely, early twentieth-century France faced an international arms race, several colonial uprisings, and the Dreyfus Affair (an internal military scandal which lasted from 1894-1906). Perhaps the assimilation of melodrama into the naturalist theatre zeitgeist reflected France’s history of betrayal by its higher-powers, but also a history in which public brutality was once a form of entertainment. Schneider writes, in his 1957 article, “During the French Revolution, spectators had flocked to watch the guillotine in action. But they had been given little opportunity for such thrills since. The Grand Guignol shrewdly cashed in on their frustration. ‘Torture has been forbidden since King Louis XVI,’ says a character in a Grand Guignol Classic. ‘Too Bad!’ is the reply.”
As much as this melodramatic turn may have been reflective, melodrama requires exaggeration in order to be successful. These plays may have been indictments of the oppressive socio-political regimes, but their hyperbole in representing this oppression may have been reassuring; no matter how dire or terrible things get, they’re as bad as what’s onstage. And, wow, they were bad.
Perhaps the most famous Grand Guignol play is de Lorde’s Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, which tells the story of a doctor who learns that his wife is romantically involved with one of his patients, so he enacts revenge by performing sadistic brain surgery on that patient—until, of course, he makes the patient go insane, and the patient fights back by ramming a chisel into the doctor’s skull. A prosthetic bald scalp, explain Hand and Wilson, was the secret. After the doctor cracked his patient’s skull, he could convincingly peel back his scalp to perform the vivisection.
Convincing special effects and compelling stage violence were the hallmarks of the Théâtre de Grand Guignol. “… it was rare indeed, in the good old days,” writes P.E. Schneider in The New York Times in 1957, at the end of the Grand Guignol’ terrifying tenure: “not to see at least a couple of people, livid and tottering, fumble towards the nearest exit. Once, when a woman, just gouged, came back on stage, exhibiting an empty, bleeding eye socket, six people fainted at once.” The man behind the blood was Paul Ratineau, the stage manager who also acted in many productions through the years, designed the makeup and special effects, and controlled the lighting and the sound effects.
The Théâtre de Grand Guignol was committed to making its queasy violence as passably-real as possible.“The theater has a secret recipe for blood; when the stuff cools it coagulates and makes scabs,” explains a 1947 article in Time Magazine. “Severed heads thudded regularly to the Grand Guignol boards, bit players were cooked in acid, and one character regularly had her face pushed down onto a red-hot stove, where it sizzled deliciously,” another Time article read, this one from the theatre’s demolition in 1962. “…First-rate viscera were made from red rubber hose and sponges soaked in blood. Hand bulbs squirted blood through a hollow in the spoons that gouged out victims’ eyes. The blood really curdled. It came in nine shades.” This job had belonged to Charles Nonon by the time the theatre finally closed. He had mixed all the blood varieties daily, himself.
Four years after La Dernière Torture, the Grand Guignol’s co-playwright, André de Lorde, wrote a handbook for actors explaining effective performance styles: “The mouth—” he writes, “Half-open: surprise, joy. Wide open: astonishment. (…) Lower lip extended: disdain, sulkiness, ignorance. Lower jawbone extended: ferociousness. Chattering of teeth: mad terror.” De Lorde was one of the Théâtre de Grand Guignol’s most important figures: the most famous and productive of the theatre’s writers (writing over 150 works, in his lifetime).. Referred to as “La Prince de la Terreur,” his works were performed at the theatre from 1900-1950, and they split influences, in writing style, between naturalism and melodrama. De Lorde wrote his acting manual as a recommendation to the general profession, and not specifically to the Théâtre de Grand Guignol.
But often, the acting involved quickly applying sleight sleight-of-hand. For example, the play Le Baiser de la Nuit necessitates that a man, Henri, maim a woman, Jeanne, by throwing vitriol into her face. They struggle, with Jeanne in Henri’s chokehold, both facing the audience. In order for Jeanne to look successfully wounded a few moments after Henri dumps acid on her, the actress playing the role needed to be very stealthy when attending to her own special effects. Hand and Wilson hypothesize how this was accomplished:
The solution we found was to transfer the focus of attention from Jeanne to Henri immediately after he has poured the acid onto her face. The ‘acid’ was in fact stage blood, used in case anyone caught a momentary glimpse before Jeanne covered her face with her hands and writhed in agony on the floor. Henri, meanwhile, moved center stage, increasingly manic in his moment of revenge, and became the focus of attention. This offered Jeanne the opportunity to reach under the drape which covered the chaise lounge to a dish containing a mixture of raspberry jam, stage blood and vaseline, which she was able to smear on her face before finally revealing herself to the audience at the play’s climactic moment.
The verisimilitude of the special effects at the Théâtre de Grand Guignol was especially noticeable because the theatre, itself, was so small. The stage was seven by seven meters, and there were 250 seats in the house. These cramped dimensions not only allowed the audience to see the realistic effects more clearly, but they also reinforced the bond between the onstage action and the audience in two ways. First, it made it impossible for the the audience to forget that they were, in fact, in an audience. Isolation was not an easy sensation to come by in a crowded, cramped theatre, with people yelling, laughing, gasping or screaming, and, of course, fainting or being revived. Second, the closeness helped foster a sense of community — it was a reminder that the show was being staged for that crowd. Many audience members were regulars; the scholar Mel Gordon refers to them and their community as guignolers.
As much as guignolers and newcomers alike were alternately nauseated and unfazed by the spectacles of horror, the Grand Guignol was always clear that everything happening was actually safe. Often, the horror and comedy plays addressed the same topics: infidelity and jealousy. The comedy could also become violent, and featured many of the same figures as the horror plays—fiendish doctors, for example, and foolish lovers—but in more buffoonish states. Taking down to size the very same archetypes that had shocked and scared audiences minutes before (or would scare audiences in a few minutes) removes the venom from these figures.
This was taken further through the reusing of many of the same actors from horror play to comedy play (who cleaned themselves up, or made themselves up, between the episodes). Furthermore, actors were familiar from night to night, while some achieved celebrity status. The actress (Paula) Maxa appeared the most frequently, in the theatre’s 65 years of operation. According to Schneider: “Not an inch of her body was spared. She died more than 10,000 times in some sixty different ways, and was raped more than 3,000 times”. She also turned cries for help into cliches. Mel Gordon notes that she “cried ‘Help!’ 983 times, ‘Murderer!’ 1263 times, and ‘Rape!’ 1,804 times.” Few things reinforce artificiality quite like reminders of performance; repetition of words or phrases give them ‘catchphrase’ status, while celebrity status provides the constant reminder that a person is not entirely the character he or she is playing.
And then of course, there were curtain calls—characters who had been dead or maimed now stood and bowed, as if nothing adverse had happened. Writes Schneider, “When, one night recently, the crashed racing driver got up to take his curtain call, a nice lady in the audience exclaimed: ‘Oh, he’s alive. What a shame.’”
