Body horror is experiencing a renaissance these days, with the release of The Substance re-upping our fascination with the hagsploitation genre and our pervasive societal fear of aging mapped onto the female body. Interestingly, exploration of the grotesque in the horror genre is often located in the early 1900s at the Parisian Grand Guignol Theatre, which made a name for itself showing sickening violence based in slice-of-life realism – the plays often drew inspiration from grisly true crime newspaper stories. Mad Love, part of AFS’s continuing Peter Lorre series, takes place in and around the Grand Guignol, where an actress tries to save her pianist fiancé’s crushed fingers with the help of a monstrous surgeon played by Lorre. Everything old is new again, so if you liked Titane or Crimes of the Future, you may like delving into the origins of the genre with this German Expressionist horror. – Lina Fisher
