Chilling thriller fuel for nightmares

David Gregory’s fascinating documentary Theatre of Horrors is not to be confused with the grand old 1973 genre chestnut Theatre of Blood, which saw Vincent Price as a deranged Shakespearean actor out to avenge himself on a London critics’ circle, employing gruesome acts of murder inspired by the Bard himself.

But then again, the two films have a common thread, suggesting that contemporary horror cinema owes a debt to live theatre.

This is specifically true of the Grand Guignol, a hideaway little playhouse in the sketchy Pigalle neighbourhood of Paris that operated for about 65 years, commencing in 1897, treating theatregoers to sex- and violence-filled spectacles that literally employed buckets of blood. The activities on its narrow little stage would fuel screen nightmares for generations to come.

Considering very little footage exists of the theatre and its productions, director Gregory makes the most out of a barrage of animators who manage to reinvent the grotesquerie that was on display.

An extraordinary centrepiece segment delineating the life and career of masochistic Guignol superstar Maxa, “the most assassinated woman in the world,” was illustrated by Winnipeg animator Leslie Supnet.

At the same time, Gregory (the founder of production company Severin Films) gives the film a solid historic/academic footing with interviewees discussing, for example, how the theatre was founded in naturalism and inspired the expressionists of the era.

Fans of the theatre included erotic diarist Anais Nin and future Vietnam president Ho Chi Minh.

How appropriate that the film is narrated by Barbara Steele, the English horror icon whose own career harkens back to the Grand Guignol era via her collaborations with filmmakers such as Mario Bava and Roger Corman.

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Apart from Supnet, the doc’s other local connection is Winnipeg-born co-producer Kier-La Janisse, whose narrative film debut The Occupant of the Room, a 31-minute thriller filmed in the template of the Brit series A Ghost Story for Christmas, will also be shown. (It’s currently streaming on Shudder as the second instalment of the Janisse-produced series The Haunted Season.)

Don McKellar will introduce the film at Saturday’s screening. He plays a schoolteacher who arrives at a hotel in the French Alps and takes the room of a woman who has gone missing. Over the course of a sleepless night, her fate will be revealed to him.

An adaptation by Janisse of one of her favourite authors, Algernon Blackwood, it’s a tad more experimental in its approach than the more formally austere British series, but it’s nevertheless an effectively chilling thriller, with none of the Grand Guignol-esque touches one might have expected from Janisse’s narrative film debut.

She certainly made a smart choice for her lead role. Known primarily as an actor, McKellar directed one of the very best Canadian films, Last Night, back in 1996.

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