Jack Jouvin's Titus Andronicus

There is a reason adolescents today play violent, bloody video games. It is for this same reason that we go to see “jump-scare” films, or adult thrillers. There is something deeply mysterious and moving in the darkness of the human soul. Not just the physical damage we can induce, not just the blood we may pour, but the psychological terrors of our subconscious. It is within these shadows that we lurch in mad voyeurism to watch the unwatchable and, for a while, feed the monsters inside us all. This desire to find a release for our violent subconscious first manifested itself in theatre, even pre-dating Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, however the Theatre that really struck (literally and figuratively) at the heart of our bloody desires was

Wanting to have complete control over the theater, Jouvin fired the best known performer from the Grand Guignol, Paula Maxa, who was known as "the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal." In her golden era Maxa was known as "the most assassinated woman in the world." Maxa was murdered using 60 different methods over 10,000 times and was raped an extra 3,000 more (on stage). Maxa, in Jouvin’s opinion, was stealing the spotlight. Jouvin's lack of directorial vision coupled with his personal motivations finally nudged the domino of downfall for the Grand Guignol. Jouvin’s new plays began to look like parodies of the theatre itself. “The abundance of terrifying elements in the later plays became so overwhelming that they were no longer believable (Peirron, grandguignol.com)”. A theatre, with little taste to begin with, lost its proverbial tongue. Come the Second World War, the theatre was shaken by much more than bomb shells, but by its own folly filled excess. In the end, it was the war that gutted the Grand Guignol. Reality overtook fiction. When the world peered into the death camps at Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz they saw what they thought was only possible in fiction. An unholy fissure tore at the heart of horror as our reality became worse than any silly play could imagine. In the spring of 1958, Anais Nin commented on Guignol’s decline in her

The Grand Guignol’s substantial and unique style translated well into film, inspiring directors with its grotesque aesthetic and writing flair. As theatre could no longer combat the atrocities of the real world, film would step in with its higher production and use of technology to reestablish that unreality to its gruesomeness. However that does not mean necessarily that film set out to merely be unwholesomely grotesque and ridiculously gory. Instead film began by bringing to light monsters not of this world; Vampires, wolf men, and the undead. Guignol focused itself more so on the actual derangement of the human mind, such as insanity and revenge. These are elements that made real humans scary, but were much blown out of proportion in the plays as to separate them from reality. However now that the world knew that humans were truly capable of such awful misdeeds, it came upon film to produce films about inhuman monsters. However, like Guignol, the monsters would often serve as foils to current events. An example is Nosferatu in which a quiet and peaceful German town is suddenly victim to a series of unnatural deaths and disorder at the hands of Nosferatu, the figure of death. The film symbolizes Nosferatu as the unsettling devastation of war upon the peaceful inhabitants of Europe. This parallel of horror to societal fears has continued throughout history. In the 50’s