Sex and death have been listed as the two most powerful driving forces behind how human beings conduct their lives.

Billion dollar industries have been formed around this idea. Horror films, for example, invite us to sit back, relax and watch as someone gets bludgeoned, stabbed or mutilated on screen.

While it might seem like a relatively contemporary thing to do, the desire to witness and confront the gruesome and the macabre seems to have been around for centuries. Why else would people show up in the hundreds to watch hangings, and how else do we explain the incredible success of the Grand Guignol Theatre, hidden away in 19th century Paris in the carcass of an old chapel?

Here’s BBC:

The theatre opened in 1897 in an old chapel in Pigalle, a disreputable district near Montmartre, alongside the Moulin Rouge. It began as a theatre of realism – showing short, one-act ‘slice of life’ plays about ordinary Parisians.

But the show that really got audiences’ tongues wagging was an adaptation of a Maupassant short story set during the Franco-Prussian War, where a French prostitute kills a German officer.

Spotting this blood-lust, the theatre’s second owner Max Maurey quickly developed a unique brand for the Grand Guignol: it became the home of grotesquely convincing horror stories, often based on real-life examples of sickening violence.

With clever staging techniques for realistically suggesting gouged eyeballs and spurting blood, and plots drawn from newspaper reports of real-life crime and depravity, the Grand Guignol was where queasy realism met gaudy melodrama. And all this proved much more terrifying – and popular – than your traditional horror narratives of ghosts or monsters.

One of the news stories doing the rounds at the time focused on a series of acid attacks in Paris.

The actors of the Grand Guignol would use an early form of latex to suggests a gooey, melting face. And in one famous short play, The Torture Garden, someone was skinned alive.

…For audience members of a delicate disposition, help was on hand. Part of the cunning myth-making of the theatre was to put about the rumour that audiences fainted at every show, and so they always had their own doctor there to revive them. In the 19th Century, as in the 21st, rumours of fainting are good for the box office.

Audiences loved it, and people flocked to the theatre from all walks of life. The dodgy location didn’t deter those of means from frequenting the theatre. In fact, the dangerous setting just added to the experience.

At the back of the theatre there was a series of private boxes with grids that allowed inhabitants to see out and watch the show, but which prevented anyone from seeing in – a feature that many carousing couples took full advantage of.

Richard J Hand, professor of media practice at the University of East Anglia, notes that:

“Apparently, people would get up to all sorts of things behind the grill,” says Hand, “to the extent of the actors having to say ‘have you finished yet?’”

Whether they were more turned on by the sex farces or the torture is a matter of speculation, but it seems the Grand Guignol’s patrons were certainly alive to the erotically charged juxtaposition of sex and violence.

The theatre was such a success in France that they decided to open one in London in 1920. It only lasted until 1922, when it was banned.

“They ran into real problems with the sex farces. Fine in France; banned in Britain. “Censorship made it impossible for them, with plays being banned outright or tinkered with by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. It was maybe too continental for Britain at that time.”

World War II would be the end of the theatre in France. The horrors of the stage couldn’t compare to the horrors of the death camps.

The rise of cinema also contributed to the end of the Grand Guignol. If you wanted a scare you’d go to the cinema for Psycho or Les Diaboliques.

In 1962, history’s most macabre theatre closed its doors.

That’s your cultured history lesson for the day. As you were.

[source:bbc]