The Theater Diabolique
The Theater Diabolique is a playhouse specializing in gory productions that dramatize crimes, murders, and supernatural terrors as ghastly spectacles for stout-stomached crowds.
• The artists of the Theater Diabolique are infamous for their mastery of theatrical artifice; they have pioneered techniques for creating fake blood, steaming entrails, and dismembered corpses that seem all too real.
• The gruesome plays performed at the theater are also supported by a few gore-obsessed illusionists who use their magic to enhance the Diabolique’s phantasmagoria of slaughter and carnage.
• A deformed masked madman named Erik Kazmark lives in the ancient tunnels beneath the playhouse; he is liable to abduct any starlet performing at the Theater Diabolique that catches his eye.
Creepy theatre masks are, of course, worn by all, I’m sure - just for that little Dionysian touch of class (and/or Divine Madness … or just to make it harder for Our Heroes to pick out the Theatre Ghoul*).
ReplyDeleteAlso, if we want to add a little extra twist to Herr Kazmark, one could do worse than to throw in a bit of Mr Vincent Price’s character from THEATRE OF BLOOD (It’s amusing to imagine the character being all about the Legitimate Theatre and deploring the Grand Guignol of the Theatre Diabolique whilst plotting the kidnap of ingenues and/or the actual assassination of people he doesn’t much like).
*I tried to type ‘Phantom of the Theatre’, but simply couldn’t make myself like it.