Founded in 1897 by French playwright and director, Oscar Metenier, the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was Paris’s smallest theater – and its most infamous. Drawing on his experience a “chien de commissaire” – the French term for one who leads the condemned to their execution – Metenier set about transforming the former convent and chapel at the end of a Parisian cul-de-sac into a showcase for stories of thieves, prostitutes and murderers at their worst.

However, the Grad Guignol’s provocative subject matter made it an easy target for censors. The theater’s stage adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Mademoiselle Fifi was temporarily halted after police shut down the production for daring to present the saga of a lady of the night — the first such on-stage portrayal in the history of French drama.

Nonetheless, the Grand Guignol proved to be a huge success and the following year, under the tutelage of director Max Maurey and novelist Andre de Lorde, the theater began to expand its repertoire into even more risqué territory. Soon, Guignol productions would trace the paths of necrophiliacs, rapists, torturers, cannibals, and thrill killers — but all meted out with an ample dose of black comedy.

In doing so, the Guignol pioneered an assorted array of then-cutting edge special effects and props, including faux severed heads, imitation acids, blunted guillotines, sheep’s eyeballs and gallons upon gallons of fake blood. Maurey is said to have measured the success of a particular play based on the number of people who would faint in a given evening. He even went so far as to hire a house doctor to play up the theater’s macabre reputation.

For the next five decades, the Grand Guignol would remain one Paris’s most popular destinations, just behind the Louvre and Eiffel Tower. Even today, the term “Grand Guignol” remains synonymous with exaggerated and excessive gore and the theater itself is popularly credited for creating an entirely new genre of drama that Hollywood has gone to exploit to great success: the slasher film.

But as the pain and strife of a real world horror story – World War II – played out across France and the greater European continent, the Grand Guignol began a slow but steady decline before finally being shuttered in 1962. As the theater’s last director famously lamented to Time magazine after the Guignol’s final performance, “We could never equal Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.”

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