Hey there! I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today we’ll be exploring—
[Mike reacts to Yorick]—aaaaah! YEEESH.
We’ll be exploring the Grand Guignol—
the horrifying theatrical tradition that had French audiences rolling in the aisles…
and then fainting in the aisles…
and then vomiting on the pavement outside the building that contained the aisles...
for more than sixty years.
Is this what Aristotle really had in mind with all that pity and terror stuff?
Did he mean literal purging?
I mean I guess a good barf can be cathartic in a sense...
And get ready for the goriest Thought Bubble yet.
And really - maybe the goriest episode yet?
So content warning for blood, guts, and mediocre French pronunciation.
Lights up!
[INTRO MUSIC]
Grand Guignol’s antecedent is melodrama, with its anti-literary,
visually forward focus on sensation and surprise.
But let’s not forget Andre Antoine and the Theatre Libre.
Because, believe it or not, the Grand Guignol—
with all its rabies and insanity and troubling exoticism
—is another offshoot of French naturalism.
It took a bunch of inspiration from the sordid side of naturalism:
the side that seemed to delight in depraved
situations designed to shock middle-class theatergoers.
One of the specialties of the Theatre Libre was short,
semi-documentary one-act plays called “comedies rosses,”
(usually translated as “cynical” or “bitter” comedies),
which depicted a low-life world of thieves, prostitutes, alcoholism, and violence.
A lot of these comedies were based on kind of newspaper story called the “fait divers,”
which were strange-but-true vignettes, usually about crime or horrifying accidents,
that filled up the pages of popular papers and were lavishly illustrated.
Unlike melodrama, they usually had sad or tragic endings.
Oscar Metenier, one of the Theatre Libre’s co-founders,
was a former tabloid journalist who once took Andre Antoine to an execution.
For fun.
Perhaps unsurprisingly:
Metenier specialized in churning out comedies rosses inspired by fait divers.
A few years after the Theatre Libre folded,
Metenier opened the Theatre du Grand Guignol in Paris in 1897.
The name comes from Guignol, a character in the French version of the Punch and Judy puppet shows.
Guignol was a working man known for his courage and wit.
So ... Is this a puppet show for grown-ups?
Maybe.
Are the human actors just “big puppets?”
Maybe.
Is it part of some cryptic conspiracy having to do with Guignol’s trade as a silk weaver?
Probably not.
But also: maybe!
French puns can be VERY complicated.
An evening at the Grand Guignol would usually feature five or six short plays,
alternating comedies rosses with shockers, and comedy comedies,
a method known as “hot and cold showers.”
Metenier ran the theater for a few years and sold it to Max Maurey,
who moved it away from slice-of-life plays toward horror vignettes—
“slice-of-death” dramas, as one critic called them.
As a director, Maury demanded absolute precision, just like Antoine.
But in 1915, he sold the Grand Guignol to Camille Choisy,
who moved the acting away from naturalistic, toward a more stylized approach.
In its 65 years, the Grand Guignol produced about twelve hundred plays.
Today, the term Grand Guignol is synonymous with the shockers—
the blood-and-sometimes-even-guts offerings.
The farces about sexual infidelity and the comedies rosses
about lower-class depravity have mostly faded from memory.
When it came to the shockers, the great writer was Andre de Lord, AKA The Prince of Terror.
He was a doctor’s kid, and even from an early age, he had an unhealthy interest in suffering.
He used to like to listen to the patients screaming behind his father’s door.
He said that he wanted to write a play so terrifying
that the whole audience would flee the theater.
You know, like, typical artist goals!
Famous psychologist Alfred Binet was another popular Grand Guignol
playwright and frequent de Lord collaborator.
He created the Binet intelligence test, which included charming questions such as,
“What is the first thing you would do if you came
home after school and found your mother strangled and mutilated?”
Their plays and those of other Guignolers favored themes like mutilation, insanity,
strangulation, paralysis, hypnosis, leprosy, live burial, guillotining,
mountaineering accidents, and the gouging out of eyes.
Rabies was also weirdly popular.
One famous actress, Maxa, said that she’d been killed at least sixty different ways.
It’s not completely clear how or why audiences enjoyed the Grand Guignol.
Did they feel genuinely afraid of the over-the-top horrors, or did they laugh at them?
Until its last decades, the Guignol never favored a camp style of performance.
The actors were instructed to make the scenes of murder,
torture, and rape look and feel as real as possible.
They gauged their effectiveness by the number of patrons who fainted at the end of each sketch.
Sometimes, as many as a dozen people went unconscious.
Sorta the inverse of a standing ovation, I guess?
To make the short plays more horrifying,
the Grand Guignol developed a bunch of gruesome stage techniques, too.
There was usually at least one vat of fake blood warming backstage.
A lighter and runnier liquid was used for new wounds, a darker and stickier fluid for old ones.
Stage weapons were invented that retracted
into their handles or that simulated bleeding when moved across the flesh.
Actors chewed soap to mimic rabies and wielded prosthetics meant to simulate
the burning and flaying and amputation of limbs.
One company manager purchased a bunch of eyeballs from a taxidermist,
hoping to find a type that would bounce convincingly.
We’ll explore the dark pleasures of the Grand Guignol by studying one of its greatest hits,
“A Crime in a Madhouse,” written by Andre de Lord and Alfred Binet and first staged in 1925.
The play starts innocently enough.
Madame Robin, a favored inmate at said Madhouse,
is having an after-dinner chat with the nun who works at the asylum.
The nun asks, “Why are you still here when you’re cured?”
To which Madame Robin replies, “Turns out, when you’ve been in an asylum for years,
people on the outside are kind of suspicious of you.
And also, isn’t it handy that I can be here to help out with the exposition.
Oh, and speaking of exposition, I sure am glad that little Louise is going home soon.
And, wow, I sure like her a lot better than the other two other ladies she rooms with,
Hunchback and the Normandy Woman.
Didn’t one of them lose a daughter, and isn’t
that why she now exhibits psychopathic behavior toward young women like Louise?
Not that I’m foreshadowing or anything.”
She goes on to say - and I’m paraphrasing here – "Hey, did it ever occur to you that
maybe One Eye, the notorious child murderer, shouldn’t be sleeping right next to them?
And I mean, what’s foreshadowing anyway?
Is that when you have four shadows?
Just asking for no particular reason.”
And the nun’s like, “Don’t worry about One Eye, she’s been paralyzed for six years.
So it’s totally fine that no one actually guards the lady patients at night.
Okay, wow look at the time gotta go how convenient.”
The nun leaves, and things get grim quick.
Help us out, Thought Bubble.
I’m gonna watch this one like this.
As soon as it’s light’s out, the nun’s like, “Gotta go pray for the dead. PEACE.”
She locks the women into their cell and leaves.
In the second act, Hunchback and the Normandy Woman are whispering in their beds.
Louise wakes up and is like, “What are y’all up to, MURDER LADIES?”
And they’re like, “Oh nothing.”
Then the door of the cell starts to open, and One Eye rushes in and holds Louise down on the bed.
Louise tries to yell, but One Eye holds a hand over her mouth, stifling her screams.
One Eye says that when Louise went crazy, a cuckoo bird flew inside her head,
and now it’s time to let the bird out… by removing Louise’s eyes.
But first, Hunchback and the Normandy Woman have
to waste bunch of time by adjusting the lighting and softening up a stiff cloth.
Because… suspense.
Once the cloth is moistened, One Eye covers Louise’s face with it
and stabs one of the nun’s knitting needles through each of her eyes.
Louise stands up long enough for the audience to see her mutilated, eyeless face.
Then dies.
The Normandy Woman and Hunchback are like, “But where’s the bird?”
Disappointed, they grab One Eye and drag her toward a conveniently
located stove… where they burn her face off and then kill her.
At that moment, a couple of the nuns return,
but everything’s dark and quiet, so they go back to their prayers.
[[[Return to Mike, cowering.]]]
Thought Bubble, THIS IS NOT A REASONABLE STANDARD OF CARE.
So what do we do with this?
Do we laugh?
Do we scream?
Do we feel purged of our pity and terror and ready to rejoin democratic society as
rational and engaged citizens with absolutely no desire to stab eyeballs or sear faceparts??
Or do we just feel really, really bad?
These are good questions to ask ourselves about horror in other forms of entertainment,
too—like movies, books, video games.
As a culture, we’ve been enjoying horror for a long time.
[Mike to Yorick] Isn’t that right, Oedipus?
But why do we love it so much?
Andre de Lord’s theory was this:
“Each one of us has in his innermost being a secret longing for violent emotions.”
Is that true?
And if it is, then why?
Maybe de Lord’s psychologist could have answered that one,
except that his psychologist was Alfred Binet, who co-wrote horror plays with him!
So he was probably like I CONCUR NOW WHICH EYEBALL DO THEY STAB FIRST?
The Grand Guignol was most popular during and after World War One.
Millions were dying in trenches, but apparently, people thought it was relaxing
–or cathartic or distracting or SOMETHING–
to go to the theater and see people killed in more outré styles;
the Grand Guignol became a huge tourist attraction.
Interest petered out after the Second World War.
Maybe radio and film had finally exceeded the Grand Guignol in barbarity?
Or maybe nightlife that didn’t make you hyperventilate and vomit became tres chic.
There’s also a theory that, when reports emerged of the true suffering in the Nazi death camps,
viewers turned against the Grand Guignol.
Simulated torture wasn’t ... fun anymore.
As the company manager Charles Nonon said,
“Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible.
Now we know that these things and worse are possible in reality.”
The theater limped along for another decade and a half, shuttering in 1962.
Thanks for holding my hand through that one.
Next time, we’ll enjoy a little less horror as we visit the Irish Renaissance,
checking in on the sparkling argument of George Bernard
Shaw and the devastating wit of Oscar Wilde.
Yorick loves a one-liner.
Until then…
Either these curtains go or I do!
Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.
Head over to their channel to check out some of their shows. like The Art Assignment, and Eons,
and It's Okay To Be Smart.
Crash Course Theater is filmed in the Chad and Stacy Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis, Indiana,
and is produced with the help of all of these very nice people.
Our animation team is Thought Cafe.
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