We'll be exploring the Grand Guignol the horrifying, a 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 60 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 could 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 gone.

Daniel's antecedent is melodrama, with its anti literary, visually forward focus on sensation and surprise.

But let's not forget Andre Antoine and the Teatro Libra because, believe it or not, the Grand Guignol, with all its Rabies and insanity and troubling exotics ism, 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 specialities of the tattered liberal were short semi documentary one act plays called comedies roasts usually translated as cynical or bidder comedies, which depicted a low life world of thieves, prostitutes, alcoholism and violence.

A lot of these comedies were based on a kind of newspaper story called the Fae Deveare, 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 that usually had sad or tragic endings, Oscar Mutiny, a one of the tach relievers co founders, was a former tabloid journalist who once took Andre Antoine to an execution.

For fun perhaps unsurprisingly, Matteini a specialized in churning out comedies.

Russ, inspired by Fait de Villiers a few years after the tattoo Lieber folded, met Any opened the Teatro du Grand Guignol in Paris in 18 97.

The name comes from Guignol, a character in the French version of The Punch and Judy puppet shows.

Daniel was a working class 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 Daniel's trade as a silk weaver?

Probably not, but also maybe, I mean, French puns can be very complicated.

On evening at the Grand Guignol would usually feature five or six short plays, alternating comedies, Russ with shockers and comedy comedies.

Ah, Method.

Known as hot and Cold Showers Matinee ran the theater for a few years and sold it to Max Maori, who moved it away from slice of life plays and toward horror vignettes slice of death dramas, as one critic called them.

As a director, Marry demanded absolute precision, just like Antoine.

But in 1915 he sold the Grand Guignol to Camille Swazi, who moved the acting away from naturalistic and toward a more stylized approach.

It's 65 years.

The Grand Guignol produced about 12 100 plays.

Today, the term Grand Guignol is synonymous with the shockers, the blood and sometimes even guts offerings.

The farce is about sexual infidelity, and the comedies Russ about lower class depravity have mostly faded from memory.

When it came to the shockers, the great writer, it was Andre de Lord, a k a.

The prince off 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 place so terrifying that the whole audience would flee the theater.

You know, like typical artist goals.

Famous psychologist Alfred Been a was another popular Grand Guignol playwright and a frequent dolor collaborator.

He created the Been a 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 Guignol Er's favorite themes, like mutilation, insanity, strangulation, paralysis, hypnosis, leprosy, live burial, guillotine ing, a 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 60 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.

Sort of like the inverse of a standing ovation, I guess.

To make the short plays even more horrifying, the Grand Guignol developed a bunch of gruesome stage techniques to there was usually at least one vat of fake blood warming up backstage.

Ah, lighter and running.

Our 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 Jude 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 the type that would bounce convincingly.

We'll explore the dark pleasures of the Grand Guignol by studying one of its greatest hits, Ah, Crime in a madhouse written by Andre de Lord and Alfred Been A and first staged in 1925 the play starts innocently enough Madam Roban, a favored inmate, Yet 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 Rabban 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 could 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 two older 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 towards young women like Louise?

Not that I'm foreshadowing or anything, she goes on to say, and I'm just 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?

I mean, what is foreshadowing anyway?

Is that like when you have four shadows just asking for no particular reason and the nun is 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 pretty quick.

Help us out the bubble.

I'm gonna watch this one.

Like as soon as it's lights out.

The nun is like gotta go pray for the dead Bruce.

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 it's like motor 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 when I holds a hand over her mouth, stifling her screams, one eye says that when Louise went crazy a cuckoo bird flu inside her head, and now it's time to let the bird out by removing Louisa's eyes.

But First Hunchback and the Normandy woman have to waste a bunch of time by adjusting the lighting and softening up a stiff cloth.

Because suspense once the cloth is moistened.

One eye covers Luisa's face with it and stabs one of the nuns knitting needles through each of her eyes.

Louise stands up long enough for the audience to see her mutilated eyeless face and then dies.

The Normandy woman and the Hunchback are like, but where's the bird?

Disappointed.

They grab one I and drag her toward a conveniently located stove, where they burned her face off and then kill her.

At that moment, a couple of the nuns return, but everything's dark and quiet.

Go back to their prayers 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 seer face parts?

Or do we just feel really, really bad thes air?

Good questions to ask ourselves about horror in other forms of entertainment to like movies, books, video games?

As a culture?

We've been enjoying horror for a long time.

Isn't that right edifice?

But why do we love it so much?

under the 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 the Lord psychologist could have answered that one, except that his psychologist was Alfred Bene, who co wrote The horror plays with him.

So Bene was probably like I concur now.

Which eyeball did they stab first?

The Grand Guignol was most popular during and after World War.

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 and more out Trey 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 and barbarity.

Or maybe nightlife, which didn't make you hyperventilate and vomit became trey 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 just wasn't fun anymore, is the company manager Charles No, no said before the war, everyone felt that what was happening on stage was impossible.

Now we know that these things and worse, are possible.

In reality, the theater limped along for another decade and 1/2 shuttering in 1962.

Thanks for holding my hand through that one.

Next time, we're gonna 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.

So do I.

Until then, either these curtains go or I do.

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