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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. A show about how we create them and why we suspend

our disbelief. I'm Eric Mollinsky. I'm always interested in looking at how something

from the past can have a big influence on modern-day culture, even if we don't realize

it. And I only learned recently how many elements for modern day horror genres came from

a really unlikely source, a theater in Paris called the Grand Gignol.

Now it might seem like a stretch to compare parisians going to the theater of the turn of

the century with people watching the latest Halloween movies, but there are fascinating

parallels. And the Grand Gignol was discovering how to scare audiences and why an audience

would want to be scared back when there were no horror movies or even horror theater. They

were inventing something brand new. Richard Hand is a professor at the University of East

Anglia in the UK. And he wrote a book about the Grand Gignol. He says when the theater

began in 1897, they were part of an artistic movement that was aimed at realism. A night

of the Grand Gignol would be a series of short plays. And at first, they were grounded,

realistic, slice of life without any actual slicing. But there was already something

edgy about the theater.

It was really the only theater in that particular district of Malmarte, that was full of

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