Grand Guignol

And lo and behold, almost immediately, his friends start dying in really strange and mysterious ways.

Because it turns out this little doodad box, which they thought initially might have been a prop from the old Paris Grand Guignol, if I'm saying that right.

Grand Guignol.

Grand Guignol.

There's a, um, I, I just didn't buy some of the characters.

Uh, Jamie Demetriou plays, uh, the, the, the, the brother of the, of the two sisters, the older brother, the half brother of the two sisters, and he plays him like almost like a Grand Guignol, you know, like a sort of a, a cartoon, uh, villain.

Him and his wife, they're like two cartoon villains.

And I know that, y- I, I just felt that I w- I didn't buy it.

Yeah.

Also, Grand Guignol never goes out of fashion.

fashion.I'm gonna laugh like I got the reference.

[laughs]

indeed.

Played in over 200 different productions, dear boy, at the Grand Guignol.

Oh, but it was monstrous, horrible, the way we used to scare the audiences.

I was hated.

And the rest of my life has been dedicated to essentially continuing this collection of stuff that was banned for no good reason by by, you know, the the politicians and the do gooders of the era.

OK, so Severin is getting ready to release this massive Grand Guignol box set.

And I know that you are just kind of an expert Grand Guignol historian.

And I'd love to start with just getting the history of it, because I know it just as this amazing theater that used to exist in France where they did horror shows like they were doing gory stuff long before cinema was doing it.

So what is the Grand Guignol?

So the Grand Guignol is a theatre that opened in 1897, closed in 1963.

And it's in the Pigalle district of Paris, which is basically the red light district.

It's where the Moulin Rouge is most famously, but it's also close to Montmartre, which is the area where lots of artists were painting and doing cabarets and things like that.

And sometimes like...

Full-on Grand Guignol that went on for minutes at a time.

Like, holy

shit! Yeah, there was a few times that I, like, with the gore stuff, I personally, I wasn't freaked out as much with the gore in this particular movie.

But I think that this really taps into the mutation element of Resident Evil in the games in a great way because, you know, you watch any footage from most of those games and there'll be people's heads popping off with tentacles and replacing them sort of stuff.

And yeah, it's got that sort of Grand Guignol, you know, sideshow sort of feeling to it.

But at the same time, I think one of the things I'm continually impressed with by Kreger's work in this one, this film is no exception, is the way that he's kind of what Chris was getting at able to present a, you know, horror film in a very broad audience pleasing way.

That's not so upsetting that it alienates people, but at the same time, he's not cuddly and his stuff really is when you, you know, try to dissect it rather bleak, like none of his films thus far are about, you know, protagonist overcoming adversity or surviving the night or, you know, defeating the evil, that sort of thing.

Reminding one of Edgar Allan Poe more than any other, he employs the method of O. Henry in the service of the horrible.

Monsieur Lavelle has given literary expression of a high order to the compact horrors of the Grand Guignol, There is undoubted originality in his treatment of that kind of gruesomeness which fascinated the imagination of Poe.

But his stories are much more real than those of Poe, terser, more concentrated in their horror.

They bear a closer relation to life, and in certain of them, there is a genuine pathos of which Poe was incapable.

But to the reader who likes this sort of thing, they offer something new in the way of tasting horrors.

Jaded as his palate may be, he will get unaccustomed thrills out of Monsieur Lavelle.

He can sit in his armchair and enjoy some of the terrors of the Grand Guignol without risking the frequent ineffectiveness of the horrible when it is put crudely on the stage.

Monsieur Lavelle is himself a gay, light-hearted man, essentially Parisian in temperament.

god damn you uh i you know it's it's really fun i mean i think all all the elements in the film uh again are are really good especially the sound design uh when it comes to when she is hearing the voices it all feels very natural it doesn't feel out of place because they established that pretty early on and um

a lot of the visual hallucination choices are really cool and genuinely kind of creepy um very much so and There's a decision in the third act as we go into the big Grand Guignol that we all know has got to come.

Yeah.

That was such a wild decision to do.