The Grand Guignol theatre: fear, hypnosis and madness in Pigalle
A deconsecrated chapel, André de Lorde and the actress Maxa: the history of the Paris theatre of horror that staged terror from 1897 to 1962.
At the end of a cul-de-sac in Pigalle, at number 20 bis rue Chaptal, stood a small theatre converted from an old chapel. One entered beneath two carved angels, and inside the wooden galleries and religious decorations remained. Here, from 1897 to 1962, the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol offered Parisian audiences a unique show: short plays of terror alternating with farces, in a sequence the public called the Scottish shower, hot and cold.
From Guignol to the theatre of terror
The name comes from Guignol, the Lyon puppet created in the early nineteenth century by Laurent Mourguet, a witty man of the people who used his stick to teach the powerful a lesson. The theatre was founded by Oscar Méténier, a former police secretary, who presented naturalistic plays about life in the underworld. But it was his successor Max Maurey, from 1898, who steered the repertoire towards terror and made it the hallmark of the place.
The playwright most associated with the Grand Guignol was André de Lorde, nicknamed the prince of terror, the author of dozens of plays. Some of his works were written in collaboration with the psychologist Alfred Binet, known for his studies of intelligence, and dealt with themes of madness, hallucination and suggestion. The theatre thus reflected the period's interest in psychiatry, somnambulism and hypnosis.
Hypnotists, spiritualists and scientists
Many Grand Guignol plays staged criminal hypnotists, unscrupulous doctors, séances gone wrong and people possessed by fixed ideas. The supernatural rarely appeared directly: more often it was modern science, or its degeneration, that produced the horror. In this sense the Grand Guignol was the secularised heir of the ancient fears of witchcraft and possession.
Its special effects were famous. The theatre's technicians had developed fake blood, prostheses and stage tricks that simulated wounds so convincingly that, according to the chronicles, some spectators fainted during performances. Part of this news was skilfully fed by the management itself, which knew how much stories of fainting attracted new audiences.
Maxa and the decline
The theatre's star was the actress Paula Maxa, active in the 1920s and 1930s, called the most assassinated woman in the world for the number of deaths she suffered on stage. Her acting, made of screams, faints and long agonies, became a symbol of the whole genre and helped make it an attraction for tourists and Parisians in search of strong emotions. The small auditorium, with fewer than three hundred seats, brought every scream very close to the spectators, and this physical proximity was an essential part of the effect.
After the Second World War the audience drifted away. The real horror of the war and the extermination camps had made it harder to enjoy simulated fear, and cinema now offered more spectacular effects. The theatre closed in 1962. The term grand-guignolesque has remained in European languages to describe an excess of macabre effects, while its repertoire influenced twentieth-century horror cinema, which inherited its taste for brief suspense and the final twist.