Imaginary Worlds - Stage Fright

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Many elements of modern horror movies and TV shows came from an unlikely source, a theater in Paris called The Grand Guignol. Beginning in the late 19th century, The Grand Guignol was inventing staples of the horror genre as they discovered how to scare audiences, and why people want to be scared. I talk with University of East Anglia professor and author Richard Hand and Wagner College professor Felicia Ruff about how we can trace the lineage of Psycho, American Horror Story and Sweeney Todd back to The Grand Guignol. Plus, Alex Zavistovich of the Molotov Theatre Group describes what it’s like to recreate Grand Guignol plays for a modern American audience. Alex also founded Poe Theatre on The Air which produces Edgar Allen Poe audio dramas like, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” which is adapted from a short story by Poe that The Grand Guignol originally staged in 1908. This episode is sponsored by Realm and BetterHelp. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I'm always interested in looking at how something from the past can have a big influence on modern-day culture, even if we don't realize it.

And I only learned recently how many elements from modern-day horror genres came from a really unlikely source, a theater in Paris called the Grand Gagnol. Now, it might seem like a stretch to compare Parisians going to the theater at the turn of the century with people watching the latest Halloween movies, but there are fascinating parallels. And the Grand Gagnol was discovering how to scare audiences and why an audience would want to be scared back when there were no horror movies or even horror theater. They were inventing something brand new. Richard Hand is a professor at the University of East Anglia in the UK, and he wrote a book about the Grand Gagnol. He says when the theater began in 1897, they were part of an artistic movement that was aimed at realism.

A Night at the Grand Gagnol would be a series of short plays. And at first, they were grounded, realistic, slice of life without any actual slicing. But there was already something edgy about the theater. It was really the only theater in that particular district of Montmartre that was full of prostitutes and sex shows and, you know, sleazy brothels and bars and, you know, a lot of bohemians around there. So it kind of built that cult viewing. I think there was a dare factor.

And the theater itself wasn't really a theater. It was a spooky old chapel. With carved angels 10 foot tall and the smell of incense and wax. Immediately it was an evocative setting. But in their first season, they had a play called Mademoiselle Fifi, in which a French prostitute murders a Prussian officer during the Franco-Prussian War. And this was the one everybody talks about. And they kept performing it, and the audience loved it.

At the time, newspapers were full of lurid crimes. And the first artistic director of the theater, Oscar Metenier, realized they can make a lot of hit plays if they adapt those stories to the stage. When the audience was queuing to go in, he would talk to them. He'd talk to people in the queue. Now, his day job was working for the Parisian police force. So he would say things like,

"'Oh, you read about that murder? "'Well, I can tell you what the body looked like I can tell you what the newspapers don't want to tell you Alex Zavistovich is the co-founder of the Molotov Theatre in Washington DC which has recreated Grand Gagnol plays for modern audiences

there was a very popular perhaps the most popular story or play that they did called The Last Kiss or The Final Kiss. And in it, a man is convalescing after having been horribly burned when his jealous paramour throws acid in his face. That scenario was actually very commonplace at the time. Acid attacks were very commonplace. was actually very commonplace at the time. Acid attacks were very commonplace.

Although he says one of their secret weapons in freaking people out was using comedy. Remember, it was a night of short plays. And in an evening of Grand Guignol, you'd have a suspense story followed by a comedy, typically a sex farce, followed by a real horror story. And the idea there is what they used to call la douche écossesse in the original French, the hot and cold shower, meaning that you needed kind of a refresher or a palate cleanser so that the horror actually hit home. And that's a staple of the horror genre today, using comedy to let the audience drop their guard before you hit them with a jump scare. But Alex is still a strong believer in the power of theater over cinema.

When you're seeing something on film, everyone kind of just starts thinking, I mean, whether it's done that way or not, everybody just thinks, eh, CGI, or that was a camera cut. But when you're doing theater, there's no denying that what they're seeing is happening right in front of them. And, you know, there are great stories when you read about the original Grand Guignol, and it's true, because we experienced it as well, that by the time you got through a production, the blood was everywhere. You couldn't get it out from under your fingernails. You walk across the stage, you can just feel your feet sticking to the floor no matter how many times you cleaned the floor.

Felicia Ruff is a professor of theater history at Wagner College. She's also written about the Grand Gagnol. She says some of the real stars of the theater were the prop designers behind the scenes. They were incredibly inventive in designing fake blood and other effects that no one had ever seen before. And over the years, they kept trying to top themselves, which is how the theater pushed beyond true crime into pure horror. into pure horror. Everything has to be precise because you've got someone who's doing a fake like gouging out of an eye. Now an eyeball is going to be rolling on the stage. Now obviously that's not the person's eye but they've got maybe they've gone and bought like real eyeballs so not human eyeballs but animal eyeballs from the butcher,

so that when they bounced, it would sound and look real. I know this sounds really disturbing, but that was the idea. There was also a lot of eating of eyeballs and organs. And they had confectioners who they would have make candy eyeballs so that you could see someone eat an organ on stage. And there's never, the audience can never have that moment where they're, and I know this is one of your themes, where they can have a moment of disbelief. Alex discovered this firsthand when his theater company staged one of the most popular plays from the Grand Guignol, The Final Kiss. As he mentioned before, it's about a man who was burned by acid and gets his revenge by throwing acid back at his former lover. And Alex says when they recreated the play, they relied on an age-old trick that the Grand

Guignol used all the time, the principle of misdirection. What we ended up doing was taking this vial of acid. It was water, of course, obviously, but we showed it and he directed his attention to it. So did the actress and therefore so did everyone in the audience. And in that moment, the actress just reached her hand forward near the footlights and grabbed a handful of stage blood mixed with torn up pieces of tortilla wrapper so that when he threw the acid in her face, she, in a natural way, would bring her face up to the wound and then drag downward so that she's just transferring her handful of stage blood and tortilla wrappers down her face. It looked extremely natural, and she's able to sort of peel off the tortilla and look at it in horror.

But all of this stuff happened directly in front of people, and they had no idea that they were being fooled ever so subtly. In their minds, they had seen the entire thing unfold directly. We'll be made for it! You can actually watch that scene on their YouTube page. And I've seen it several times, and I still can't figure out

when the actress grabs the tortilla strips mixed with stage blood while the man is threatening to throw acid in her face. But Alex discovered the really gross stuff never had the same impact as the little horrors. We had another play where we had, again, a tremendous amount of bloody special effects. But early on, we had somebody cut the palm of their hand using just the kind of novelty prop thing that you could find at a toy store. Just the little razor blade with a squeeze bulb. And that little cut on the palm of an actor's hand when they showed it to the audience got a

much greater reaction than an onstage disemboweling, for example, which was in the same play. Because it's just much more relatable. Nobody knows how to react to it. You're just sort of witnessing a spectacle when you see something as grand as a disemboweling. But everybody's had a real vicious paper cut. Richard Hand says the original Grand Gagnol also discovered they could rely on subtle effects to unsettle an audience. You know, we know sound is one of the greatest secret weapons in horror and horror movies. So they would do things like have sound effects from the rear of the audience. If you're suddenly hearing the smashing of the window as the serial killer's coming in, but that's behind you, I imagine people on the back row thinking they're safe.

They're suddenly up front. It's here behind me. So they would do things like that. And it made it, I know it's a cliched word these days, but kind of immersive. But the plays weren't just about shock value. The Grand Gagnol kept coming back to certain themes, which will feel very familiar today. For instance, the fear of new technology. The Grand Gagnol did plays about automobiles when they first started showing up on the streets of Paris.

And they did a play about the telephone. In it, this kind of what we call a yuppie kind of character. He's having dinner with friends and he says, oh, you've got a telephone like us. Everybody, everyone who's somebody's got a telephone these days. And I'll just phone home to see how my wife and baby are. And he phones up and he hears there's an intruder in his home and he hears his wife and baby are. And he phones up and he hears there's an intruder in his home and he hears his wife and child murdered. He's at the end of the phone, miles away.

There's nothing he can do. Now, all very interesting, the place of phones in horror. But this play is from about 1901. It's really early. It's really early. So Scream and all these wonderful films that use telephones so brilliantly through the decades, you can trace it back to that moment of technophobia on the Grand Cugnol.

It's horrible. It's gory. But you don't see a thing because that's happening in the other house. You just see the guy listening powerless as he loses his mind, as it all happens on the end of the line. And it wasn't just new technology. The Grand Gagnol would do plays about anything in the news that made people feel uneasy. The Grand Gagnol would have done a play about

the last American troops to leave Afghanistan or something like that, something very topical. In fact, they did a play about the Boxer Rebellion that is almost exactly that. And so audiences are watching something that's very, very contemporary. Another common theme was the fear of medicine, and medicine. But there's also something relatable, I think, for the audience who are investing all of their faith and belief in the power of science and medicine. And then the grungy dog presenting doctors getting it wrong, doctors going crazy and abusing their patients and all of these things. And you realize that is something really terrifying for them.

There's a line where they call for a doctor in the house because somebody faints. And they're like, we can't get the doctor. He's fainted too. Again, Felicia Ruff. There are lots of reasons why doctors become characters in these plays. You know, partly it's because of the setting. Partly it's because a doctor is allowed to touch a person and kind of they're given permission. And so now they might be able to violate that touch with something sinister or sexual.

You know, we shouldn't leave out that there's like a kind of voyeuristic sexual element in all of these horror plays. But so many of these plays are written by doctors. They are medical doctors who are writing for the Grand Guignol. There are even some psychologists, this is an emerging field too, psychologists who are writing about madness in the Grand Guignol. So again, it sort of ties back to the idea of an imaginary world, but that this is real, that this could be real, that this could be happening at an asylum near you or a hospital near you. Okay, Felicia gets bonus points for working the entire tagline of my show into two of her answers. Anyway, in the end, she feels like the appeal of the Grand Gagnol

really came down to a feeling of voyeurism. I think part of it is that sense that at the end of the night, you've escaped. You're alive. That feeling that I'm alive. I'm walking out of here safe and I'm going home. I've been through that. I've seen somebody else suffer and die on stage maybe, but I'm alive. I feel alive. There's a little bit of Schoedenfraud in there, but I think there's also a real sort of the physical sensation of feeling a kind of triumph and being able to walk out into the street, having escaped the horrors.

After the break, the Grand Gagnol dies by its own hand, but it gets resurrected as a spirit that haunts modern horror genres to this day. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle.

We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. The Grand Gagnon mostly stayed in Paris, but starting in the 1920s, there were a few different versions in London. Most of them were short-lived because the British government was allowed to censor plays, and this French horror theater was not exactly their cup of tea. So the versions that played in the UK were heavily watered down. But Richard Hand says they still found a loyal audience. Like there was one play about a scientist who wires up the head of a guillotine victim and brings it to life with electricity. Well, in 1928, that head was played by a young British actor called James Whale, who would go to Hollywood soon afterwards and make Frankenstein.

So when we have It's Alive, James Whale knew because he was the head on the wires three years before. And that is one of the reasons why the Grand Gagnol started to decline. The movies were giving them a run for their money. Because the Grand Guignol used to be a perfect date night for young couples. But maybe that audience that are going to go along with their boyfriend or girlfriend and have a bit of a laugh and then a drink afterwards, maybe they're going to the movies. Maybe they're going to go and see Les Diaboliques, a magnificent French film,

which is totally Grand Guignol, but you can have fantastic close-ups of the body in the bath and things like that. Also, over time, many of the creators of the Grand Guignol retired or passed away. And Felicia says the next generation didn't quite have the knack. The stage itself was only 20, like it was a very, very small, it was like 20 feet. So there's this real kind of intimacy. And at some point, if they're not doing the show perfectly, it's going to lose its reality. And then it loses the impact.

So it can't, it can never come up short. That's one of the things the actors from that era talk about. Like, they had to be perfect. If you lost your audience, it was almost impossible to get them back in the middle of one of those shows. And tourists were going. So it was becoming more of a commercial thing than a really artistic thing. But the real decline of the Grand Gagnol happened during the Nazi occupation of France. The problem wasn't that no one was going to the Grand Guignol during World War II.

The problem was who was going. You know, some theaters closed down during the occupation. It didn't have to stay open, but it chose to. occupation it didn't have to stay open but it chose to it continued to be successful and it was with the occupying German soldiers going to watch the Ranginol but I think for some people local people I think there was a little bit of betrayal there and especially then it throws a light on the content so when you know what was going on in World War II and the thought of people going and getting pleasure out of bloody violence on the stage, suddenly not quite so funny anymore, perhaps not quite so much fun. Now, I remember, you know, sometimes said that after Auschwitz,

horror was impossible. So the Gronkhino had to go. I think that's a bit too simplistic. After World War I, the Grand Guignol entered its golden age. That didn't put people off. They would have been seeing invalid soldiers on the streets of Paris. But I think it's that World War II factor, that complicit nature of the Grand Guignol, I think for some people, it's hard to forgive. The Grand Guagnol finally closed in 1962. By that point, it had been a shadow of itself. And the world had changed so much. When the Grand Gagnol began, Queen Victoria was ruling the British Empire. And when it ended, the Beatles were recording their first album. During that time, warfare went from swords and horses

to nuclear missiles. And when the theater closed, Psycho had already come out two years earlier. And it was very Grand Gagnol with its gothic atmosphere, a nihilistic ending, the feeling of true crime, and lots of blood. Mother, oh God, mother, blood of blood. In fact, I found a 1959 New York Times story about the making of Psycho, and the reporter compares Psycho to the big horror movies of the time, like The Blob or The Fly, and he says, quote, Mr. Hitchcock believes, a la Grand Guignol, that horror is human. The Grand Guignol also influenced pop culture in more subtle ways. When the theater shut down in 1962, the movie Whatever Happened to B.B. Jane had come out, where Bette Davis famously served

Joan Crawford a dead rat for dinner. That movie kicked off a new genre that critics were calling Grand Dame Guignol, where aging actresses played monstrous characters, and the set design and cinematography reflected their dark, twisted emotions. You know who ate those movies up? Quentin Tarantino. Whether it's intentional or not, I found in almost every review of a Tarantino movie, at least one critic compares his style to the Grand Gun Yule. And usually they're talking about the shock and horror. But Alex Zavistovich has been thinking about the movie Death Proof, which is part of the Grindhouse

double feature, because there's a moment in that movie which reminds him of the style of acting in The Grand Gagnol, which often came very close to breaking the fourth wall. There was a moment where Kurt Russell's character is using binoculars to sort of survey his next potential victims as they're driving down the highway.

And he takes his binoculars down looks straight out and looks directly into the camera which you know is a no-no in filmmaking and a slight change comes across his face this like a very slight grin that suggests, yeah, stuff's about to get heavy. But it was that direct address, that fourth wall ambiguity that is part and parcel of what it meant to act in the original Grand Guignol that obviously got translated directly to film. The Grand Guignol also influenced horror comics in the U.S. Some of the American publishers had visited the Grand Gagnol, and their horror comics were so controversial, Congress held hearings in the 1950s, which led to the creation of the infamous comic book censorship code.

There seems to be your May 22nd issue, and there seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman's head that has been severed from her body. Do you think that's in good taste? Yes, sir, I do. For the cover of a horror comic. And Richard Hand says, we can't forget television. He still sees the reflection of the Grand Guignol on TV today. Because, you know, the Grand Guignol loved its short plays. They weren't interested in doing a long play. They wanted to take you to the final act

and hit you over the head immediately. But I think, you know, televisual horror, American Horror Story, Penny Dreadful, all these series, they're not full-length movies. They're episodic. They have an ensemble. The American Horror Story guys, you know, Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, I mean, they are descendants of the grongignol stars,

loving what they're doing, and you never know, are they going to be the victim or the villain. I'm here to help you identify your gifts and teach you how to control them. Dear diary, I've seen my future. It is pink and wrapped in silk. Everybody is dead. Don't you get that? I am not going to roll over and take this anymore. I am done telling myself to calm down. You remember what happened to the last person we occupied. That is such an interesting comparison because, I mean, like American Horror Story, the Grand Guignol was a theater troupe and they kept reusing the same actors over and over again. Yeah, that's right. And I think in that way, you kind of get a sense it's quite a specialized form, perhaps, you know,

that they were real masters of this. And I know Paula Max, the most assassinated woman in the world and all this, the legend goes, she really mastered the form and and it's fascinating getting responses to what people made of her and the cult around her and she tries to do other things but she comes back to the gronkin y'all probably typecast by that point but they're again in the gronkin y'all as i said sometimes she's a victim her screen was legendary but there's some plays where she plays nasty bits of work as well and loves every minute of getting a bit of revenge speaking of theater and revenge we can't forget the most popular horror musical of all time sweeney todd it's about a barber who slashes the throats of his customers and his downstairs neighbor turns the bodies into meat pies and And once again, I found an article from the New York Times.

It was a 1979 story about the making of Sweeney Todd, where Stephen Sondheim says he'd always been interested in the Grand Guignol, and he saw Sweeney Todd as his chance to make a Grand Guignol-style musical. That makes sense to Felicia. Sweeney Todd was built on a melodrama which was built on, melodrama which was built on like real crime

stories. That's the same, that's where a lot of the material at least initially came for the Grand Guignol from these real crime stories that they were trying to reenact. of Sweeney Todd. His skin was pale and his eye was odd. He shaved the faces of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard of again. Richard also sees the influence of the Grand Gagnol on immersive theater today, which is usually set in a spooky or evocative location that was not originally a theater. And that's all very popular. But still, he wonders, what is the role of shock and horror in our culture today? You wonder, don't you? We're in a world of trigger warnings now.

You know, what do we do about that? I think there's a contract. I think you have to say to people, yeah, if you really don't like horror, if it's going to give you nightmares, don't bother. That is such an interesting point about we're now in the culture of trigger warnings. I mean, the Grand Guignol completely flies in the face of that.

Yeah, that's it. I mean, yeah, it's difficult, isn't it? Because you don't want to destroy the plot, trigger warning, describing what's going to happen. You need your surprise factor in the plays, even though often with horror, often with Grand Guignol, I think when something happens, a moment of horror, I knew that would happen, you know. But at the same time, it's the suspense getting there, isn't it? This kind of spider and the fly kind of thing. It's inevitable, but it's how you get there. One of the thrills of the Grand Guignol was leaving the theatre and feeling like you survived.

Being alive may have been something we took for granted in the before times, but in the age of COVID, when theaters are just starting to open up again with lots of safeguards, until a show is shut down because there's a COVID outbreak among the cast or crew, I'm not sure we need to be reminded that we're lucky to walk out of a theater alive and healthy. Although I am certain if the Grand Guignol were still around today, they would definitely write a play about that.

Or maybe several plays about that. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Richard Hand, Felicia Ruff, and Alex Zavistovich. Also, thanks to Annika Chapin, a listener who suggested this episode. In the show notes, I put a link to the Molotov Theater. Now, they also do radio dramas based on Edgar Allan Poe, and the Grand Guignol used to stage adaptations of Poe's work. So I also put a link to their Edgar Allan Poe audio dramas in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the

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