Settle in this spooky season with The Frighteners!
Posted on 2025/10/20 , tagged as
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Whether you’re a fan of the supernatural or you enjoy chomping on popcorn as a masked killer chases their victim with a chainsaw, settle in to understand why millions of people seek to be disgusted and freaked out.
The Frighteners is Baptist minister Peter Laws’ journey into the macabre, as he dives headfirst into our love of horror culture and how it offers us a safe way to confront our mortality.
Join him to meet vampires, hunt werewolves in Hull, talk to a man who has slept on a mortuary slab to help him deal with a diagnosis, and be chased by a maniac through a farmhouse full of hanging bodies.
Grab your crucifixes, pack the silver bullets, and join the Sinister Minister on his romp into our morbid curiosities with the extract below.
I’ve had the you’re-a-bit-kooky glance a fair bit because I’ve loved creepy and macabre things pretty much my whole life. And by that I mean I’ve really loved them. The dark, the mysterious, the weird, the scary, they’re valuable to me. They matter. I reckon if you slice my brain open, there’d be a whole section dedicated to the gothic and strange. Or more likely it’s threaded all over, like when you spill coffee on your laptop and it gets everywhere.
One of the earliest places I noticed my love of the dark side was at theme parks. I’d always slap open the map and search for the ghost train first. The big rollercoasters? The thrill rides? I skipped them, because I get spectacularly motion sick. I braved the waltzer once just to impress a girl and ended up puking on her shoulder and chest. Yet I’ll giddily push through cobwebs and hanging fake tarantulas in a fright ride because it clicks a pleasure switch in me that I don’t always understand; I just know that it’s there.
When Halloween comes around, I’m the fella in the supermarket lurking in the tacky novelty fang aisle. I’m trying on masks and chasing my squealing kids down the ready-meal section. I’ve got this compulsion to squeeze and prod every single prop to see if it makes a ghostly scream or a blood-thinning cackle. Often I set them all off at once, just so I can unleash 30 wailing witches through an otherwise jolly store.
My humour cortex has a little horror spilled on it too. I saw a photo the other day of a plastic baby-changing unit, one of those drop-down ones you get in public toilets. Somebody had written on it: PLACE SACRIFICE HERE. I’m not exactly ‘pro’ baby sacrifice, but man, I laughed hard at that. When I showed it to others, they looked at me like I was insane. Which made me chuckle even more. So I looked even … um … insane-er.
Yeah, I’m that guy.
In the car, I sometimes listen to electro, sometimes kitsch lounge music – the type you’d hear in a 70s supermarket. And sometimes I even listen to normal everyday music that plays on low-number radio stations. But often it’s the soundtrack to films like Creepshow (1982) or Tenebrae (1982), Don’t Look Now (1973) or Pet Sematary (1989). And as the violins squeal (minor chords, naturally) I’m popping to the shops or doing the school run. Not feeling glum or depressed at all, just living my life like everybody else, only threading it with a little spook.
Now, other fans of the morbid don’t have any issue with this at all. They slip into the passenger seat, hear the music and say, Wow! This is The Omen soundtrack, cool. But let me be frank, and perhaps obvious: most other people don’t say ‘wow’ or ‘cool’. When they gather in my kitchen for my 40th birthday and see the cake has meticulous icing replicating the hotel carpet from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining (complete with sugary axe embedded in the centre) they say Oh yeah, you like those things don’t you? And there’s a nervy little twitch behind the awkward smile. A flicker that makes a statement: Maybe it’s not just odd to love morbid culture, maybe it’s odder than odd. Maybe it’s twisted, dangerous even, to be so into the dark side of life.
Thing is though, I’ve been like this my whole life. I even remember the reports from my Parents’ Evenings. They consisted of a lot of ‘yes …, but …’ phrases from my teachers:
English: Yes he’s good, but does every story have to have a werewolf in it?
Art: Yes, he tries hard, but aren’t there other things he’d like to draw apart from skulls with chomping fangs? Plus, we’re running out of red crayon.
Music: Yes, I appreciate he’s teaching himself the glockenspiel, Mrs Laws, but he’s eight and he’s playing the theme from The Exorcist over and over. It’s creeping Mrs Bates out.
My mum even says that when I was born (during a storm that blew the lights out, apparently – how ominously cool is that?) I grabbed a pair of scissors and held them aloft. She immediately decided I’d either be prime minister or a mass murderer. Thankfully, her bizarrely polarised prediction never came true, but, at the same time, I have always felt a bit different. But then, doesn’t everybody? You probably feel odd sometimes, in those quiet moments in a coffee shop when you wonder if you’re the only person in town listening to that piece of music, reading that particular book, thinking that specific thought.
Some people use culture to make them laugh, others only watch tearjerkers that’ll guarantee a good cry. I’ll take those too – I’ll happily watch a romcom. But my heart beats fastest when I read a spooky tale of hauntings or watch a scary movie, or when I sit on a plane that’s slicing through the clouds towards Transyl-bloody-vania! My wife Joy sits next to me. She’s watching some BBC crime drama on her tablet while I devour The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to ‘Dracula’. I’m reading a wild fact about the real Dracula (and national hero) Vlad the Impaler. He once nailed turbans to the skulls of a group of Turks because they refused to take them off in his presence. He got all sarcastic and said, ‘I’ll help you keep your custom,’ and then the whacking began. It’s a barbaric incident, and I despise real-life violence, yet for some reason my brain notes the long passage of
time since this incident happened, then files the story under ‘cool’.
Saying that out loud probably sets warning bells off in some people’s heads. For example, I recently read about a vintage issue of Cosmopolitan magazine which told women that the ‘video store’ was a great place to meet men … unless they were in the horror aisle. In which case, such a man would obviously have ‘questionable feelings about women’ and would be clearly, ‘a man to avoid’.1
Is that really what people think? Is it what you think – that there ’s a monster crouching inside me, waiting to unzip my chest and climb right out? And what about the other fans of the macabre, the millions scattered across living rooms, trains and airport terminals, libraries and swimming pool loungers, watching or reading grisly forensic crime dramas, or playing out ghostly visitations or murder in video games? Are all these people death-obsessed freaks? Violent time bombs, even?
I’m especially conscious that people’s frowns deepen when they hear my profession. I might be wrong, but I suspect that it’s this that makes people think I’m really off base.
You see, I love darkness, but I’m also a church minister.
The Frighteners by Peter Laws is out now in paperback!
