Category Archives: Bizarre

Cinéma diabolique

Yeah, I’m on about Sweeney Todd again. Who knew? Actually, I watched a DVD extra from the film (thanks, Sam), and it got me thinking about a genre of theater that only lasted about 50 years, but made a big impression — obviously — on many filmmakers of our generation.While making Sweeney, director Tim Burton envisioned a movie reminiscent of the Grand Guignol tradition of live theater. So, what was this deliciously evil brand of entertainment, anyway?

Grand Guignol (let’s first get the French right: it’s pronounced “grawn geen-yol”) was the name given to a type of play performed in Paris, beginning around the turn of the 20th century. Its creator, a controversial playwright named Menetier, bought an old chapel and converted it into a theater where he could freely show his works, which often depicted the dregs of society doing scandalous things. He eventually sold the theater to another guy, who decided to convert the Theatre du Grand Guignol into a horror palace.

The plays got increasingly macabre and violent. More and more liberties were taken to see just how realistic a murder scene could become. Grand Guignol was in its heyday, and the theater often attracted the high society of Paris, as well as its share of tourists — all of them looking for the ultimate gross-out. They got it. The actual plot of the story didn’t seem to matter, as long as it was gruesome, bloody and realistic.

It had the desired effect, too. In his book, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror, Mel Gordon says:

At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening’s faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals.

Awesome.

The GG eventually died out in the 1960s, but it’s enjoying a renaissance out in San Francisco right now.

Indeed, the effect of Grand Guignol on mainstream film was felt long before Burton’s Sweeney Todd – many times throughout the 50s and 60s, most notably.

But hey, remember the movie, Interview With the Vampire ? It’s based on one of my all-time favorite series of novels (The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice). Here’s the original trailer for the 1994 film, starring Tom Cruise. Brad Pitt was in it too, and it also featured a very young Kirsten Dunst. I loved it. Anyway, in that movie, there is a scene in which the vampires of Paris put on a play in the Théâtre des Vampires — a takeoff on the Grand Guignol Theatre.

The only difference, of course, was that in the play they performed, the audience had the unfortunate experience of slowly realizing that the human sacrifice depicted onstage was, in fact, quite real…

So rent Interview this weekend and watch it with your hunny. I might blow the dust off my VHS copy of it and share a cinematic memory of days gone by, when Tom Cruise was actually *not* a wackjob.

Vive la Grand Guignol!

Le Rongeur de Finque

Random weirdness

Did you learn this in history class?

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In 4 years of high school, none of my history teachers ever brought it up.

Here’s the question:

What 20th century event killed 20-50 million people in one year?

Was it Viet Nam? World War I? World War II? The Korean War? The Holocaust death camps? Nope on all counts. It didn’t have anything to do with guns or bombs or gas chambers.

It was the flu.

The influenza pandemic of 1918 still stands as the single most deadly epidemic in history. And it didn’t start in some remote jungle in South America. It began in Kansas.

A soldier at Fort Riley reported to the infirmary on 11 March, 1918, complaining of a bad cold. By the end of that week, 500 more were in the hospital. Within days, they were all dead.

The next month, similar incidents surfaced in Boston and Philadelphia. By the fall, people in Chicago were dying. And it wasn’t a long, drawn-out thing, either. People died within days of contracting the flu — death by asphyxiation. They simply suffocated trying to draw air into lungs packed with foamy red slime.

Folks were freaked. They made gauze masks, as if that would stop the virus in its tracks. Soon, the dead bodies were everywhere. In the streets, in bedrooms…the dead were piling up so fast, people didn’t know what to do with them.

Theories circulated about what could be causing the sickness, from dirty dishwater to the Germans poisoning air filtration systems and water delivery methods.

In the middle of all this, there was a war going on, so the military had to send boys over to Europe to fight. Only problem: they took the flu virus with them.

Soon, two continents were sick. But it was far from over in the US. It cut a swath from the east coast all the way to San Francisco, where it killed hundreds, but then mysteriously died out. The city blasted the sirens, telling folks that all was well. Within a month, 5,000 new cases were reported.

By November of 1918, it was killing 10,000 people per week. Then, like a deadly tornado being sucked back up into the sky in an instant, it was gone. Done.

In 2004, researchers at National Geographic used some tissue from a flu victim buried in the Alaskan permafrost (fortunate, because there were no freezers to preserve tissue samples in 1918), and concluded that the virus was spread by birds. Bird flu. Sound familiar?

I think I’ll skip the chicken sandwich today.

Photo credit: National Archives

A riddle wrapped in a mystery…

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…inside an enigma.

Such is the weird case of D. B. Cooper, the airline industry’s first hijacker.

It’s unthinkable nowadays to consider putting passengers on an airplane without a thorough bag-and-body check, but it was done every day with impunity until after the Cooper hijacking – and even then, it wasn’t nearly as thorough as it needed to be. I remember flying to Europe and back in 1976 without so much as a sideways glance into my luggage by anyone.

On 24 November, 1971 in Portland, Oregon, a man identified on the manifest as “Dan Cooper” boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727, sat in seat 18-B, and gave a note to a stewardess:

I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.

He then instructed the girl to tell the pilot to land in Seattle, where Cooper would hold all 36 passengers hostage until Northwest Orient delivered $200,000 in unmarked $20 bills and 4 civilian-class parachutes.

Everybody complied. He got the money and the chutes, and then released all the passengers and flight crew, except for one attendant and the pilots. He ordered the men to take off and head for Reno, flying at only 10,000 feet and at minimum airspeed, which was about 196 MPH.

Shortly after they were airborne, Cooper opened the aft stairs (the long stairway underneath the plane, below the rudder), and disappeared into a thunderstorm – and into the unknown. Neither his body nor his parachute have ever been found, and his identity remains a mystery to this day.

I hate that.

Over the last 4 decades, several theories have been pitched at establishing who “Dan Cooper” was (the “D. B.” part of the name was a newspaper misprint that just stuck). None save one – the copycat hijacker Richard McCoy, Jr. – ever really panned out. And even that one is suspect. Doesn’t matter now anyway – the FBI shot him to death after he escaped from prison, where he was two years into a 45-year sentence for a 1972 hijacking.

In 1980, an 8-year-old boy on a camping trip found $5,800 in $20 bills on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state. They were later determined to be the same bills that Cooper extorted from Northwest Orient. Last month, a bulldozer unearthed an old, tattered parachute in northern Washington. But just today, the skydiving expert who actually handed the chutes to Cooper back in ’71 said that there’s no way it was the one he gave the hijacker. Case open – again.