NEW YORK CITY -- When the rides stop running at Coney Island each year in October, the area takes on a desolate and decidedly creepy character. That's all fine and well with the Coney Island Museum, which on Saturday night hosted the Grand Guignol Variety Show, an homage to the eponymous Parisian production that specialized in theatrical gore, sex and violence from 1897 to 1962.

The event, co-sponsored by the Morbid Anatomy Library and Atlas Obscura, featured two original plays from the Grand Guignol's golden era. They give a sense of what the theater was like in its heyday: In one, a spurned woman mutilates her former fiance with sulphuric acid, only to meet the same fate at his hand. In another, a man's unrequited love for the wife of his closest friend drives him to cast a hypnotist's spell on her. When she's tragically killed in a train crash, the spell's power remains. Disfigured and grotesque, she returns from beyond the grave to be at his side. Horrified, he kills himself...
--"Coney Island Museum Hosts Creepy Homage To Victorian Horror Theater," The Huffington Post, Rachel Tepper

Read the whole article--a review of Saturday's Grand Guingol Variety Show--in today's Huffington Post by clicking here. Please be indulgent when you read my quotes, keeping in mind that it was my birthday and I had had a few drinks by the time this interview took place...

All images are from the slide-show linked to the article and depict, from top to bottom:

1. MC Lord Whimsy with the cast of The Strange Case of Me Tarzan directed by G F Newland: Nick Demko-Pavese and the "bathing beauties" Megan Fitzpatrick, Rachel Rideout, Christine Colby and Lady Aye
2. Christine Colby in her Skeleton Dance costume
3. Mentalist Les Baird doing one of his amazing feats with a volunteer from the audience
4. Scene from L’Amant de la Morte (The Lover of the Dead), original Grand Guignol script from 1925 directed by Melissa Roth
5. Scene from Baiser dans la nuit (The Final Kiss), original Grand Guignol script from 1912, directed by Meg Moseley
6. Shot of the crowd thronging the gin bar, featuring cameos of Melissa Milgrom, Eric Bobelin, Aaron Beebe, and lots of unfamiliar faces

Source:
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