 Late in 1915, prolific French director Louis Feuillade released the first instalment of Les Vampires. Even by the standards of his previous successes in serialized silent cinema, the project was incredibly ambitious. With a complex, double-cross filled plot and the amoral band of criminals at its heart, Les Vampires helped invent the vocabulary of the cinematic thriller. Despite a scathing critical reception and multiple attempted bans by the moralists of the day, the release of each instalment was a resounding audience success. Regardless of the title, the story owed more to the pulpy plots of crime and adventure novels than the supernatural. Not until the sixth instalment, "Les Yeux Qui Fascinent" does the film briefly flirt with the metaphysical. A criminal with a "hypnotic gaze" uses his mesmerism to make a stooge of an innocent housemaid, all the better to take the spoils of the titular gang's heist as his own. It's a rather slight plot point, with the maid given a scant few minutes of screen time in a serial that runs over 10 hours in total. Even the teenaged actress tasked with the role was given a demure ingenue's credit, as Mademoiselle Maxa. Yet, in her brief turn, there's an undeniable charisma in her performance. Using only carefully calibrated gestures and her doll-like eyes, she telegraphs both terror and terrible desire. Hypnosis becomes something more akin to a little death (in either the literal or the French idiomatic sense). The cocktail of fear and arousal would define her professional life. Stardom lies not in the endless rolling of the film cameras but on the well-trodden boards of a tiny stage of a chapel turned theatre in the backstreets of Paris. The Grand Guignol had existed since just before the turn of the century, and much as its namesake puppet was used to deconstruct sociopolitical issues, the venue had taken to tearing down the classical conception of theatre for the (then brand new) movement of naturalism. Abandoning romanticized symbolism for a comparatively gritty look at the harsher aspects of human life, the plays staged often dealt with the seedy underbelly of Paris society, delivered in the appropriately working-class argot. Rather than ignore the existence of class differences, crime, vice or perversion, naturalistic plays were more interested in the psychology behind the ugly truths of contemporary taboos than they were in idealized fantasy.  By 1917, the Guignol had weathered a sea of controversy for the content of its stage shows. Rather than attempt to change its reputation, the theatre heeded its ticket buyers' morbid curiosity and leaned into more visceral horrors. In a publicity stunt familiar to any retro horror fan, a staff doctor was retained in case the scenes on the stage caused audience members to faint. In a further bit of ballyhoo (variations of which lasted well into the cinematic drive-in era), reputedly, one of the calls for a medic ended with the reveal that it was the doctor himself who had fainted. The theater's director at the time, Camille Choisy, wanted to push the boundaries even further. Upon his acceptance of the position, he brought along a host of lighting and technical effects so that the staging of the violence would be as realistically gory as the loosely ripped from the headline's content of the writing. Aside from the standard-issue retractable daggers and prop skulls, he drew from the world of stage magic and sleight of hand to create complex illusions of every possible permutation of death and dismemberment. Choisy was responsible for making the name Grand Guignol synonymous with splatter, and he was the one who hired Paula Maxa, minus the girlish honorific that had marked her screen credits.  The same gestural, expressive qualities she had displayed in her film work were even more effective in the close environs of the small theatre's stage. Her ability to raise a blood-curdling scream on cue certainly didn't hurt, either. During her decade-plus stint at the theatre, she died in a dizzying array of ways. Shootings, stabbings, disembowelment, dismemberment, decomposition, scalpings, maulings by offstage pumas, no method of untimely demise was too exotic or too brutal for the spotlight in the evening's performance. No matter how elaborate the torturous twists and turns of the latest play, Paula Maxa acted out each ghastly set-piece to rave reviews and packed houses. The oft-quoted figure of her dying on stage over 10,000 times has likely been slightly exaggerated for effect, but it does illustrate just how important she was to the theater's success at the time. Soon, she had reached the level of fame where only a mononym was necessary, the posters and handbills prominently announcing "Maxa" amongst their gorier illustrations. The press of the day lovingly referred to her as "the most assassinated woman in the world" and "the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal" [1]. That being said, the Grand Guignol's nightly shows were a collection of short playlets, alternating between horrors and the lighter fare of sex farces or comedies taking a satirical poke at bourgeoisie manners. With the theater's small stock company, players appeared in multiple roles across the single act storylines. Particularly in her early days as a member of the ensemble, Maxa likely would have been tasked with parts across both sides of the emotional spectrum. As the Guignol's most popular leading lady, Maxa would have had to perfect both her comedic and dramatic timing as suited the playlet and hit multiple physical marks for the purpose of the bloody illusions. No one understood this better than the lady herself, who noted in her memoirs, "In the cinema, you have a series of images; everything happens very quickly. But to see people in the flesh, suffering and dying at the slow pace required by live performance, that is much more effective" [2]. One missed cue or blown line "could easily ruin the tension built up over 10 or 15 minutes and destroy the evening" [3]. To believably reenact one's own grisly death night after night is draining. To deliver your monologue, feign a faint at the precise angle that doesn't allow the audience to see you unlatching the cabinet that contains the prop arm (facilitating the faux dismemberment of your now deceased character's corpse) is an impressive feat. To do all of the above while half-dressed in a drafty theatre, covered in the rapidly cooling raspberry jam-based mixture that served as realistically coagulating blood[4], is a pinnacle of a skilled show business trouper. Nothing is quite so difficult as the appearance of effortlessness. While Paula Maxa certainly fits both the literal and figurative definitions to be an early example of what we now know as a "scream queen", her work also points to the limitations of the term. There is often a high degree of physical and psychological endurance required in effective genre performances in any medium. This increases exponentially for female performers, who often bear the brunt of the more gruesome storylines regardless if they are cast as enduring "final girls" or doomed victims. While the stagecraft and promotional tactics of the Grand Guignol are a very clear influencer for the much later rise of gore horror and grue in genre cinema's love of the splatter film, Paula Maxa's most individually lasting legacy might be the skillful manipulation of her professional appearances and personal mythology to carve out a space in an often male-dominated field. Even when supposedly providing unvarnished biography to the press, she never let the truth get in the way of a good story, swerving from a few mundane verifiable facts to personal anecdotes that told tales of obsessed lovers, crime and perversity that could have been ripped directly from the pages of the plays in which she starred [5]. The artifice was effective in fueling public fascination. Even after her dismissal from the Grand Guignol's employ, Maxa could easily wave it off as her being a touch too close to the material, her performances so effective that she was fired for "having too popular a following" [6].  She wasn't the first actress to use dark sensuality as a selling point. Unlike her Les Vampires co-star Musidora, or American contemporary Theda Bara, Paula Maxa branded her dark cocktail of sex and death as immediately and viscerally as the theatre that made her a star. A movie theatre provides a safe remove from even the most wicked and dangerous of cinematic vamps. Paula Maxa had a far more intimate venue in which to work, coupled with an innate understanding of the public's enduring fascination will all things macabre. As Max stepped out into the lights each night to recreate yet another violent death, she helped even the most jaded ticket holders feel brilliantly alive as they stumbled shaken into the dark Paris nights, looking over their shoulders to double-check that the madness and mania had been safely left behind at the theatre door. Sources/Bibliography/Further Reading:[1] House Of Horrors Agnès Pierron and Deborah Treisman Grand Street, No. 57, Dirt (Summer, 1996) [2] Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter Performance Studies) Richard J. Hand & Michael Wilson (2019) preface pg viii, translation from Agnès Pierron's Le Grand Guignol (1995) pg 1392 [3] Theatre of Fear & Horror: Expanded Edition: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 Mel Jordan (2016) [4] Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter Performance Studies) Richard J. Hand & Michael Wilson (2019) pg 57 [5] I'm The Maddest Woman In The World Maxa True Magazine (1938), reprinted in full in Theatre of Fear & Horror: Expanded Edition: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 Mel Jordan (2016) [6] Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter Performance Studies) Richard J. Hand & Michael Wilson (2019) pg 19    Comments are closed.
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