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More than 60 films, eighty hours of video, twelve discs and a 350-page book, all of it about a Paris theatre that made its name on on-stage gore. Morbid Pleasures: A Compendium of Grand Guignol & The Grand Guignolesque opened for pre-order this week at $249, against a $379.95 list price, and is scheduled to ship in late December.
Severin Films is billing it as the label’s most monumental collection to date, and the disc count is not the flex. The films run from 1895 to 2025, and a large share of them have never had a home video release in any format. Disc one carries David Gregory’s documentary Theatre of Horrors: The Sordid Story of Paris’ Grand Guignol, which is the spine the other eleven discs hang off. Gregory trailed this box in an interview with iHorror in August, when he described a set in the pipeline whose earliest film dated to 1895 and a silent collection the label was still assembling.
The Most Assassinated Woman in the World
The collection gives its own section to Paula Maxa, the Grand Guignol’s resident victim, who was marketed under that billing and whose job was to be killed in front of a paying audience night after night. Around her the set assembles work by Fred Paul, Maurice Tourneur, Robert Hossein and Vernon Sewell, and runs Jean Rollin’s The Vampire Women and The Mask of the Medusa together on disc eleven.
The book is called Blood, Sweat & Sperm: The Visceral Horrors of The Grand Guignol, and its contributor list is the strangest thing in the box: André Breton, Aleister Crowley, Alfred Binet, the theatre’s house playwright André de Lorde, critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, scholar Richard J. Hand, and Maxa herself.
Alice Cooper, GWAR and the Wizard of Gore
Among the new extras are interviews with Alice Cooper, GWAR and the W.A.S.P. “Rack Girls,” which is where the set stops being a film collection and starts making an argument. The through-line it draws is not horror cinema alone but true crime and live heavy metal, and the claim underneath it is that a theatre which closed in the 1960s never actually stopped running. On the evidence of the guest list, that argument is the most interesting thing Severin is selling here.
The silent material comes with new scores by Steven Severin, David J and Tim Newman, Stephen Thrower, Michael D. Mortilla and Neil Brand. Severin is the Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist, who has spent years performing live scores for silent film under the name Music for Silents.
Pre-orders are open on Severin’s own store, which is also selling it as the Grandest Guignol Bundle with three poster reproductions and an enamel pin.
Anybody weighing the two editions should look at disc twelve before deciding. It holds Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore from 1970 next to Jeremy Kasten’s 2007 remake, and it ships with the limited edition only.