Jules Ch矇ret (May 31, 1836 - September 23, 1932) was a French painter and lithographer who became a master of Belle ?poque poster art. He has been called the father of the modern poster. Le Th矇璽tre du Grand-Guignol was a theatre in the Pigalle area of Paris (1897-1962). Oscar M矇t矇nier was the Grand Guignol's founder and original director. Under his direction, the theatre produced plays about a class of people who were not considered appropriate subjects in other venues: prostitutes, criminals, street urchins, and others at the lower end of Paris's social echelon. At the Grand Guignol, patrons would see five or six plays, all in a style that attempted to be brutally true to the theatre's naturalistic ideals. The plays were in a variety of styles, but the most popular and best known were the horror plays, featuring a distinctly bleak worldview as well as notably gory special effects in their notoriously bloody climaxes.