The frighteners : a journey through our cultural fascination with the macabre

The frighteners A journey through our cultural fascination with the macabre

Peter Laws

Book - 2018

The Frighteners is a bizarrely compelling, laugh-out-loud exploration of society's fascination with the dark, spooky, and downright repellent, written by a man who went from horror-obsessed church hater to a God-fearing Christian, who then reconciled his love of the macabre with his new faith. Laws takes us on a worldwide adventure to shine a light on the dark corners of our own minds. He meets the people who collect serial killers' hair, spends a night in a haunted hotel, and has dinner with a woman who keeps her own coffin in her living room, ready for the big day. He's chased by zombies through an underground nuclear bunker, hunts a supposed real-life werewolf through the city streets, and meets self-proclaimed vampires w...ho drink actual blood. From the corpse-packed crypts of Rome to the spooky streets of a Transylvanian night, he asks why he, and millions of other people, are drawn to ponder monsters, ghosts, death, and gore. And, in a world that worships rationality and points an accusing finger at violent video games and gruesome films, can a love of morbid culture actually give both adults and children safe ways to confront our mortality? Might it even have power to re-enchant our jaded world? Grab your crucifixes, pack the silver bullets, and join the Sinister Minister on this celebratory romp through our morbid curiosities.

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Subjects
Occultism.
Fear.
Published
New York, NY : Skyhorse Publishing 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Peter Laws (author)
Edition
First Skyhorse Publishing edition
Item Description
First published 2018 in the UK by Icon Books.
Physical Description
276 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-271).
ISBN
9781510726765
  • Chapter 1. The Sinister Minister
  • Chapter 2. Theatre of Blood
  • Chapter 3. Wired For Fright
  • Chapter 4. Hiding the Bodies
  • Chapter 5. Zombies, Everywhere
  • Chapter 6. Killer Culture
  • Chapter 7. The Beast Within
  • Chapter 8. Deadtime Stones
  • Chapter 9. The Haunted
  • Chapter 10. Sister
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgements
Review by Booklist Review

Laws, an ordained minister, is also a horror-film buff and a bit of an outside-the-box thinker. We love horror movies, books, and video games, he argues persuasively, not because the world is uglier and more dangerous than ever before but for exactly the opposite reason. We need horror stories because our world is less violent than ever before, at least for the middle class and above. We have, Laws says, a fear reflex hardwired into us, and, before we had societies and laws and all that other stuff, that reflex was essential to staying alive (imagine how the human species would have fared if there was, say, no instinctive fear of meat-eating animals). Horror stories do for us what the world used to do: they stimulate the fear response, and in so doing they keep us healthy. Evolutionarily speaking, horror movies, books, and games are absolutely essential to the human species. This is not simply a defense of a genre that routinely comes under fire for its graphic violence; it's an intelligent, perceptive, and very well written successor to Stephen King's 1981 classic, Danse Macabre.--David Pitt Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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