Theatre of Death, Cinema of Blood - the Grand Guignol's cinematic legacy

The Grand Guignol in all but name - Theatre of Death (1967)

In the summer of 1962 cinema-goers could catch Herbert Lom gurning from the wings as he pitched his cunning against Michael Gough's pompous fraud Lord D'Arcy in Hammer's retread of The Phantom of the Opera, where he literally brings the house down with the aid of an embittered dwarf. By the end of the year it would be Hammer themselves drawing the curtain on another theatre, as in November the great Théâtre du Grand-Guignol of Paris closed its doors for the final time. That's the conventional narrative anyway, that the full-blooded horrors and the bodice-stretching bosoms on display in the likes of The Curse of Frankenstein and The Brides of Dracula offered something far more appealing and titillating than anything you could catch down the rue Chaptal. As Grande Dame of Grand Guignol scholarship Agnès Pierron notes, the downfall of the theatre 'coincides with the ascendancy of the Hammer film'. Graphic bloodshed and gore had found its way into cinema, and the French theatre had become a quaint curiosity.

The Secrets and Science of Fake Blood

You don’t actually need all this kit, but seriously, who cooks blood in Tefal?

A large part of the mystique surrounding the original Paris Grand Guignol lay in the blood effects used, the ‘secret’ recipe becoming as much of a marketing gimmick as KFC’s 11 secret herbs and spices. An otherwise irreverent 1947 Time magazine article writes that ‘The theater has a secret recipe for blood; when the stuff cools it coagulates and makes scabs’. Professor Mel Gordon, specialist in the Grand Guignol, describes the mixture as heated carmine and glycerine in equal proportions; made of boiled, crushed scale insects, carmine seems more fittingly macabre than glycerine, which at the time was generally administered as a cough syrup. This blood recipe has the advantage of being liquid when warm, but seeming to congeal as it cools – like honey, glycerine is thick and sticky, but thin when melted. For the Grand Guignol in its declining years, though, the carmine stains became increasingly irksome to remove; Gordon hypothesizes that as money got tight ‘Large body wounds were limited to women (smaller costumes to clean) and head wounds for men (less hair to clean)’. In fact, there are very few body wounds in the original plays of the Grand Guignol, perhaps as much because of the emotive nature of facial disfigurement as of the excessively sticky recipe, guaranteed to ruin suiting fabric.