The Theatre du Grand-Guignol was a French theatre that was famous for one thing: bloody awful plays.

The theatre started running their famous plays from 1898, showing shocked Parisian audiences whores, beggars and thieves on stage. They gauged their success by the amount of people that fainted while watching. Many plays were shut down in the name of decency. It was a constant fight with censorship to keep the plays going. One play included a necrophiliac based on a real person caught molesting bodies 10 years earlier, others had nannies that strangled children and characters that sported every disease known to man. Though the characters were famous, the theatre was remembered fondly for the amount of blood and gore they used in their act.

One actress was the subject of multiple on set deaths. Paula Maxa, who soon became known as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal.” During her career at the Grand-Guignol, Maxa, “the most assassinated woman in the world,” was subjected to a range of tortures unique in theatrical history: she was shot with a rifle and with a revolver, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses, kissed by a leper, and subjected to a very unusual metamorphosis, which was described by one theater critic: “Two hundred nights in a row, she simply decomposed on stage in front of an audience which wouldn’t have exchanged its seats for all the gold in the Americas. The operation lasted a good two minutes during which the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse.”

The actors played to the fears of the common French man; fear of foreigners, diseases, and fear of the proletariat. No fear escaped their blood soaked plays, and the actors played in to every nuance taking cues form their audience’s reactions. The audiences loved it and came in droves to see the mixture of bloody special effects, gripping drama and comedy. For the pre world war 2 years, Paris horror theatre was alive and hopping (or dead and twitching).

Unfortunately due to the excessive amount of violence in their plays, stricter censorship guidelines, and the gaining tolerance of more modern audiences, they became a parody of themselves. In 1962 the Grand Guignol shut it’s doors for the last time. People lost interest, and this form of gore theatre was lost. Or was it?