Grand Guignol

A victim of possession, played with grand-guignol gusto by Marta Gastini, responds to Father Lucas's ministrations with elaborate writhings and squirmings; a male victim wouldn't have given the genre its requisite sexual charge. ❋ Joe Morgenstern (2011)

Conveying the idea, as McNally does, that opera is an elevated farce may work for laughs, or even for grand-guignol tragedy (the end of “The Lisbon Traviata,” when opera invades life). ❋ Unknown (2010)

Although written more than half a century before, Emily Brontë's grand-guignol masterpiece has much in common with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca: for Wuthering Heights read Manderley, for Heathcliff read Maxim de Winter. ❋ Unknown (2011)

"cirque" et de "grand-guignol" à propos du "grand emprunt" annoncé par Nicolas Sarkozy lors du Congrès de Versailles en juin dernier. ❋ Unknown (2009)

In reality, the genre is a far broader church, an overarching set of aesthetic impulses that reaches right out to the present day and encompasses the glowering intellectualism of These New Puritans and An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump; the high-velocity, grand-guignol pop-punk of My Chemical Romance (and if you doubt that Gerard Way belongs at the high table of gothic lyricists, check out the demonic, goggle-eyed descriptive flair of ❋ Unknown (2009)