Grand Guignol is Coming to Colorado

Pandemic Collective is bringing us their annual, spooky treat in the form of more Grand Guignol performances. Every year, the esteemed, inclusive, and creepy troupe serves up funky horror shorts that got their start in the Grand Guignol style and now have a serious following in the form of the horror anthology.

Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol was originally a theater in Paris started by playwright Oscar Méténier in 1897. The building was the smallest theater in Paris, and it was decorated with items of gothic nature and iron railings. Méténier’s plays were too gruesome to show which resulted in his work being censored by police.

Méténier focused on directing, while his partner Max Maurey specialized in the artistic aspects of their performances. It was said that Maurey measured the success of his plays by the number of people who fainted. They even had doctors on stand to assist those who couldn’t take it.

As the plays grew in popularity, they added to their cast and brought an abundance of new brilliance to Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. In addition to the gore, their shows often consisted of prostitutes and criminals. At the time, asylums were on the rise, and mental health was beginning to be explored scientifically. Soon, the theatre began to profit off that trend. 

Le Théâtre du Grand-Guigno touched on topics like necrophilia and nannies killing children. The fear of the unknown frightened the theater’s guests, while drugs and panic gave the audience something to relate to. The theater’s specialty for visual effects also evolved greatly over the years.

“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 [time] the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse,” a critic is noted to have said.

When Jack Jouvin took over directing the play, his focused switched from fears to psychological horror. However, this also began the downfall of the theater. Rather than having believable gore, the exaggeration of the performances resulted in the death of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guigno.

After the second world war, the genre of horror subsided, as reality was enough to deal with. 

However, in recent years, the style has made a resurgence with local theatre troupes and in the form of the horror short in the film world. Pandemic Collective are notorious for bringing us the best of the best in this genre, and they are doing it again this year. Two of the original plays will be recreated this year by Pandemic Collective. The performances will take place at 5138 W 29th Avenue on October 11, 12, 17, 18, and 19.

Be sure to add this to your October spook list, and snag tickets here.