Drinking with Skeletons
In 1892, three cabarets/theme restaurants opened in fin-de-siecle Paris, each one based around a different depiction of death and the afterlife. These morbid, macabre, and often titillating escapes had antecedents as well as contemporary parallels and modern successors, but there was nothing else quite like them before or since.
All three have taken on a sort of mimetic second life on the internet in recent years, as postcards of the distinctive architecture of especially the Cabaret de l’Enfer have made the rounds online, often with little context. Indeed, for context on any of the three “cabarets of death,” one must turn to Mel Gordon’s posthumously published book of the same name.
As a horror writer by both inclination and trade, I am possessed of something of a macabre bent, and so it is easy to lament not ever having gotten to experience any of these places in person. The Cabaret du Neant, with its combination of stage magic and moribund philosophy is particularly appealing to my own aesthetics, even while it is impossible to argue with the gaping “hell mouth” and demonic bas-reliefs which decorated the facade of the Cabaret de l’Enfer.
Rather than feeling sorry for myself about what could have been, however, I have tried to console myself with the fact that I can visit these amazing nightclubs of the past vicariously through Gordon’s book and, in so doing, I have also realized something else. While these “cabarets of death” may no longer exist, we actually do have modern equivalents that come closer to this experience than one might think.
I myself was lucky enough to visit New York’s famed Jekyll & Hyde Club at its location on the Avenue of the Americas some years ago, before it was closed down by COVID. For those who never made it to the club itself, you can get a small taste of it in a rather surprising spot: an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, in which Titus gets a job at a fictitious horror-themed bar that is clearly intended to stand in for the Jekyll & Hyde.
When it comes to Omaha’s Monster Club, I was not so lucky. It also closed down during the pandemic – likely never to return – before I ever got a chance to attend. But even as these less ephemeral inheritors of the mantle of the “cabarets of death” succumb to the inevitability of entropy, they are replaced with more transient examples of a similar idea.
Here in Kansas City, we have a spooky-themed pop-up bar called Apparition which materializes every year around Halloween. And it’s not alone. While they may not serve food and drinks, the Halloween haunted attractions that are as much a part of the holiday as bedsheet ghosts and grinning pumpkins are also relatives of the “cabarets of death.”
More recently still, in 2023, my friend and Horror Pod Class co-host Tyler Unsell launched a new spin on the pop-up bar idea. The inaugural Drinkaway Camp was a slasher-themed “pop-up experience” which combined the standard fare of themed drinks and decorated ambiance with games and interactive puzzles meant to lead to a more immersive affair overall. It was a big success, and future iterations (with different themes) are already in the planning stages.
I’m not actually a drinker, so there is very little to tempt me into most bars. But I am a connoisseur of morbid entertainments, and so these sorts of fascinating anomalies always attract me. Is it more fun to imagine the so-called “cabarets of death” that once haunted Montmarte than it would have been to actually go to them? Perhaps. But it is a lot of fun to imagine.
