It’s Fall – my favorite season. Which means Halloween is just around the corner.<\/p>\n
I’m heading to Europe here for a business trip that will take me through Paris. While looking into things to do, I found out about this theater. It was located in the\u00a0Pigalle\u00a0area of Paris (20 bis,\u00a0rue Chaptal). From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962, and specialized in naturalistic\u00a0horror\u00a0shows. Its had live staged graphic,\u00a0amoral\u00a0horror entertainment, a genre popular from\u00a0Elizabethan and Jacobean\u00a0theater (other examples include Shakespeare’s\u00a0Titus Andronicus<\/i>, and Webster’s\u00a0The Duchess of Malfi<\/a><\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The White Devil<\/a><\/i>). Today, we might call them splatter films. While it was always staged horror,\u00a0the \u201cspecial effects\u201d would sometimes be too realistic and it was reported audience member would faint or vomit during performances. It was said the ‘success’ of the show was rated by how many people fainted.<\/p>\n It didn’t help that the building was an old chapel. The Gothic interior added to the ambiance. Here were some of the plays for example:<\/p>\n It’s interesting that\u00a0it waned in the years following World War II then closed in 1962. Management attributed the closure in part to the fact that the theater’s faux horrors had been eclipsed by the actual events of WW II two decades earlier. Apparently people had their fill of realistic horrors.<\/p>\n\n