There’s a cultural reference to the Grand Guignol in the movie Mad Love.
The movie stared Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol, a man in love with the macabre. He attends all the theater performances of his secret love, the actress Yvonne Orlac who performs in what is called Théâtre des Horreurs, but is certainly a reference to the Grand Guignol.
LINK TO COLUMN: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/976/whats-the-story-on-the-grand-guignol-the-original-shock-theater
From der Wiki: Grand Guignol
Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (French pronunciation: [ɡʁɑ̃ ɡiɲɔl]: “The Theater of the Big Puppet”) – known as the Grand Guignol – was a theatre in the Pigalle area of Paris (at 20 bis, rue Chaptal). From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962, it specialized in naturalistic horror shows. Its name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre (for instance Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil), to today’s splatter films.
At the Grand Guignol, patrons would see five or six plays, all in a style that attempted to be brutally true to the theatre’s naturalistic ideals. The plays were in a variety of styles, but the most popular and best known were the horror plays, featuring a distinctly bleak worldview as well as notably gory special effects in their notoriously bloody climaxes. These plays often explored the altered states, like insanity, hypnosis, panic, under which uncontrolled horror could happen. Some of the horror came from the nature of the crimes shown, which often had very little reason behind them and in which the evildoers were rarely punished or defeated. To heighten the effect, the horror plays were often alternated with comedies.
Audiences waned in the years following World War II, and the Grand Guignol closed its doors 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 the Holocaust two decades earlier. “We could never equal Buchenwald,” said its final director, Charles Nonon. “Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.”
The Grand Guignol building still exists. It is occupied by International Visual Theatre, a company devoted to presenting plays in sign language.
From Cecil’s 1994 article, What’s the story of the Grand Guignol, the original shock theater?
THe Theatre of Vampires in Anne Rice’s INTERVIEW was certainly a homage to the Grand Guignol also.