The Frighteners E-Book

Peter Laws

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 444

Beschreibung

The Frighteners follows the quest of Peter Laws, a Baptist minister with a penchant for the macabre, to understand why so many people love things that are spooky, morbid and downright repellent. He meets vampires, hunts werewolves in Hull, talks to a man who has slept on a mortuary slab to help him deal with a diagnosis, and is chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac through a farmhouse full of hanging bodies. Staring into the darkness of a Transylvanian night, he asks: What is it that makes millions of people seek to be disgusted and freaked out? And, in a world that worships rationality and points an accusing finger at violent video games and gruesome films, can an interest in horror culture actually give us 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 his romp into our morbid curiosities.

Leseprobe

For Emma and Adam

This book – about scary things sometimes being fun – ended up as a celebration of self-acceptance. But it takes thousands of words to get there, and there are some pretty freaky bits along the way. So, for now, you can just read the shorter, nine-word version of the book. Here it is:

Be who you want to be, okay? Be you.

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationCHAPTER ONEThe Sinister MinisterCHAPTER TWOTheatre of BloodCHAPTER THREEWired For FrightCHAPTER FOURHiding the BodiesCHAPTER FIVEZombies, EverywhereCHAPTER SIXKiller CultureCHAPTER SEVENThe Beast WithinCHAPTER EIGHTDeadtime StoriesCHAPTER NINEThe HauntedCHAPTER TENSisterAcknowledgementsCopyright

CHAPTER ONE

THE SINISTER MINISTER

I’m in Luton airport, and the guy on security is rummaging through my bag. He keeps squeezing and prodding stuff. Checking if my pants are ticking or if my toothpaste contains a nerve agent. He asks me where I’m off to. Finally! I’ve been hoping he would ask that because I get punch-the-air excited when anybody does. I beam at him and I say, all chipper, ‘I’m going on holiday.’

‘Yes, but where to?’

[mental drum roll] ‘Transylvania!’

He drops the toothpaste, frowns, then eyes me up and down. ‘Really?’

‘Yep.’

‘It’s a real place?’

‘Course! It’s in Romania.’

‘You’re going to vampire land?’ He tilts his head. ‘On holiday?’

I want to slap my hands together like a sea lion. ‘I’m staying in a spooky old Saxon village. It’s gonna be amazing.’

He does something next that I’ve seen other people do in this situation: he slowly glances at my wife, as if she’ll explain this anomaly. It’s not like he’s found cocaine in my bag, or a severed limb. He’s not horrified by me, but I can tell he’s confused. My wife shrugs: ‘He likes morbid stuff, and he’s wanted to go since he was a kid.’ She looks apologetic. ‘It’s his 40th birthday present.’

His eyebrows spring up. ‘Yes, but why on earth would anybody want to go there?’

To be honest, it’s the same reaction I’ve had from most people this last month, when I’ve told them where I’m headed for five days. I say the five-syllable word and they do a double take … Transylvania. They don’t exactly cross themselves and stumble backwards, like the gasping, creeped-out innkeepers from the first ten minutes of a Hammer Horror movie, but it’s close. A mate of mine had a similar frown last week. All he could say was: ‘Why? Is Benidorm shut?’ Another told me about her upcoming break in France, and when I mentioned my trip she burst out laughing, right in my face. ‘Wow, Peter,’ she said. ‘You are so weird.’

I’m used to these sorts of looks. Like when folks come round my house and see my home office; they can’t avoid the huge vintage drive-in posters of 70s movies like Dracula’s Dog (1978) and Nightwing (1979). Or my badass Grizzly (1976) poster that screams 18ft of Gut-Munching Fury! Or maybe they spot my bookshelf, which is bulging with titles like Dreadful Pleasures, Ghoul Britannia and Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck. Maybe they spot my signed collection of the complete soundtrack to all of the Friday the 13th movies (about a guy in a hockey mask who chops up teenagers), or if they’re really observant, they might recognise a chunk of stone that I nicked from a supposedly haunted church, famous for grave desecrations in the 60s. I have a piece of it on my window sill. Next to that are the original storyboards from an 80s horror movie called The Mutilator (1985). And piles of magazines and books with real-life tales of the paranormal.

When guests see these morbid items, as I politely take their coats and offer them Earl Grey, they sometimes give me a look that says: Is it wise to accept this tea?

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.

We’ve landed in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu.

The airport has strip lights, clean floors and industrial strength hand dryers which shine little blue lights on my wrists before trying to blow all the skin off. It’s like any other airport I’ve been in. I’m not sure what I expected really: large oak doors creaking open? A shuffling hunchbacked man with a sheet over his arm, holding a candelabra and grunting: Passport, sir? Did sir pack his satchel hisself, sir?

I’m not disappointed though, because as we’re collecting our bags from the conveyor belt all I keep thinking is: I’m in Transylvania, I’m in Transylvania. I catch Joy’s gaze. She winks at me. This is a cosmic wormhole away from her ideal holiday. She’d rather be on a city break, eating fish in a glam restaurant, but she knows this matters. She understands that I have a bucket list like anybody else, only mine’s scrawled with Gothic swirls and thunderbolts.

There are supposed to be three other English couples on the same trip as us, but we haven’t seen them yet. I start scanning the crowd looking for people who look like they’d choose scary castles over poolside karaoke. There’s no guy with studded boots and a long leather jacket striding about; no top-hatted pseudo-Goth, creeping to the Coke machine in a ‘dark and epic’ way. Everyone just looks normal. But that’s the thing about us fright fans. We can blend in. Some of us even wear fleeces. We lurk in unexpected places.

We brush past the rest of the world on the Tube; we write prescriptions in the doctor’s office; we help kids finger-paint at pre-school; and we serve skinny lattes with dainty sprinkles. We clean public toilets, and we own multinational corporations. You’ll even find us wandering the corridors of power and running the country, like the Conservative MP John Whittingdale. During his time as Culture Secretary, he admitted that he liked ‘really nasty films’.2

Whittingdale cited stuff like Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), which is a pretty brutal movie. One scene has a Dutch businessman cheerfully drilling holes into the legs and chest of an American backpacker. Then the Dutchman slices the guy’s Achilles tendons, followed by his throat. It’s a film that centres on lingering, protracted violence. But get this: Whittingdale didn’t admit to watching this stuff after some sort of police sting on his property. He wasn’t contrite about it. He happily admitted his morbid tastes to a newspaper journalist, and the public didn’t seem that bothered – perhaps because so many of them had gone to see the film themselves. It was a multiplex hit, across the world. The fact that a high-profile politician can publicly admit he’s into films like this, without being socially lynched, suggests that we’re living in a world where even extreme horror is slipping into the mainstream.

Take Halloween, for example, Christmas for spooky folks. It’s more popular today than ever. I grew up in the 1980s, in the North East of England. Back then I’d be lucky to find a set of glow-in-the-dark fangs in a high-street shop. I’d trawl the streets searching for Halloween masks, but it’d always be those crappy plastic ones with the twangy white elastic. They came in three flavours: Witch, Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula (or the Mummy if you found a really swanky place). Yet the plastic would often crack apart, and it’d cut lines into your cheek. It felt less like Halloween and more like ‘the annual strapping of a margarine tub to your face’.

But there was another world, a horror Shangri-La: the seaside town of Blackpool and its joke shops. I stood in one of them during a break at Pontin’s Holiday Camp, when I was ten. The shop had this amazing latex werewolf mask hanging from a high hook, with crazy big fangs and a mass of wild grey hair. The type of get-up Michael Jackson might wear on a date. I was desperate to buy it, but the price was so high my parents nearly vomited. At £70 I couldn’t blame them. Remember this was mid-1980s money. Back then you could probably buy a hovercraft for that. As a British kid, I quickly learned that decent, morbid merchandise was a ‘speciality’ product. A mail-order thing. It certainly wasn’t mainstream.

Today though … wow.

You can buy proper werewolf masks in Asda supermarket for twelve quid, along with a mahoosive range of screaming skulls, rubber knives and fake severed hands. As a kid I was so itchy for scares that I swapped a cardboard box full of rare comics for a single, floppy, chopped-off hand prop. That box could have probably paid my mortgage off these days, but it wasn’t stupidity that made me do that deal, it was the era. In my hometown, fake severed limbs were rarer than a Sasquatch. Not anymore. Asda do a super-cool hand for £10, which crawls by itself. Tesco do a severed zombie’s foot for £2.99! Morbid kitsch is a lot cheaper these days, and the reason for this is simple: demand. In 2015 Asda met this demand by tripling its stock of Halloween costumes. They upped their supplies of scary makeup by 60 per cent. Sainsbury’s creepy costume stock went up 30 per cent that same year.3 UK marketing analysts have even claimed that Halloween is now the third biggest sales ‘event’ for retailers – behind Christmas and Easter.4

For some, just dressing up in white sheets and trick-or-treating doesn’t cut it. Growing numbers want more intense, scarier Halloween experiences. Something’s been quietly exploding these last few years in the tourism and leisure world that’s not just scratching the world’s horror itch, it’s tearing it open and digging deep inside. Theme parks, farms and warehouses are being converted into seasonal horror houses so that visitors can crawl through pitch black mazes while live actors with fake knives hunt them down. This is the ‘Scare Attraction Industry’, where people are paying real-life money to be petrified.

A few years ago, events like this would have been incredibly niche. These days, you could visit one and be back home for bedtime. The continual growth of the scare attraction industry means it’s even breaking free from the Halloween season. Scare events are cropping up all year round, with names like ‘Night of the Killer Rabbit’ at Easter, or ‘Jingle Hells’ at Christmas.

I tried one in March called ‘The Pit’. For £3 some bloke yanked a sack over my head and I was forced to clamber through a maze while people grabbed and pushed at my body. Unseen mouths of actors screamed into my ears, saying they were going to kill me. Two hissing women dragged me down saying, ‘Oooh, we like you. We’re gonna keep you here … forever!’ To which I said, ‘At least buy me a drink first.’ It was all quite fun really, although I saw others come out of The Pit shaking and unable to speak. The same company helped organise much more extreme events like Survival: Cracked, where paying guests have their heads rammed into troughs of water and are force-fed slop. Yep, this is happening today. This is a thing.

Horror conventions are also on the rise. There used to be a time when Star Trek fans were the only ones who had those. Now events celebrating scary movies are cropping up all over the place. In May 2017, I was a presenter at the biggest one in the UK: HorrorCon in Sheffield. The place was rammed with thousands of fans over two days. There were constant streams of people lining up to pay big cash to get posters signed by sadistic onscreen killers. Merchandise tables sold teddy bears with entrails hanging out and severed witches’ heads in glass bell jars, ready for the mantelpiece at home.

At these conventions, everywhere you look you’ll see ordinary people dressed as zombies, werewolves and fictional murderers – and the skill level of these make-ups is sometimes Hollywood-level, with thousands of pounds and hours invested in getting them right. I chatted with an entire family of zombies once. One of the little girls had half a Coke can rammed into her gore-soaked eye. ‘I made sure she could see out of the drinking hole,’ her mum told me. So I looked down it, and, sure enough, there at the bottom of a soft drink can was a little blinking eye.

So, in the world of Halloween and horror, business is good – and the cinema box office is no exception. In 2016, the Guardian reported that horror movies are ‘the most profitable genre in the industry and it’s booming. This year is set to be horror’s best ever.’5

Here in Transylvania, the travel operators don’t hide the horror heritage: they actively celebrate it. Multiple companies now offer a Dracula-themed holiday experience. Of course, there’s a lot more to Transylvania than vampires – it has stunning mountains, and wild bears, and pints of beer only cost a pound. Yet these are all just a wonderful bonus to me. The prime factor that has enticed a bundle of English men and women to holiday in a former communist country is our love of the undead.

As we scan the airport for the others, our host Jez arrives. He looks like the Red Baron. He’s wearing a bomber jacket with a huge fluffy collar; though he has ditched the long white scarf, blowing out at a 90-degree angle. He ’s gripping a clipboard bearing the company name, Secret Transylvania, and the sight of it makes people shimmy out of the crowd to form a group. We check each other out. Everybody’s a similar age. There’s a grinning couple from the Highlands, plus a Greek girl and her bearded English boyfriend. The latter two cuddle a lot. A third couple appear. They’re from Essex. We stood right behind these two in the security queue way back in Luton and had no idea we’d be in the same vampire clan. All eight of us shake hands and introduce ourselves. As we head to the cars, I hear nervous giggling because none of us is quite sure what to expect. The website said we’d be looked after by an English couple who run a small travel business in an old Saxon village away from the city. This is all in a country notorious for blood and mystery. It sounds like a horror movie plot, right there.

We lug our bags across the car park, and Joy leans into me, whispering, ‘How do we know they’re not just going to take us to the woods and kill us?’

‘I think Trip Advisor would have mentioned that,’ I reply.

We bundle into a car with the Scottish couple, Kenny and Lorraine. He’s smiley, she’s giggly. Turns out they have five kids, so I guess any time out of the house makes them ecstatic. I quickly like them.

‘So …’ Joy clicks her belt in the back seat. ‘Whose idea was it to come to Transylvania?’

‘Lorraine’s,’ Kenny says. ‘She’s got a thing for vampires.’

Lorraine chuckles and nods. ‘True.’

‘And you, Kenny?’ I say. ‘Are you into all this vampire stuff?’

‘Nah, but it’s her 40th, and she’s always wanted to come here.’

Joy and I erupt into laughter, and I give Lorraine an immediate, mental high five. As the engine sputters into life, I’m reminded that maybe I am weird, but, hey, that’s not such a big deal when you’re walking through a world that’s filled with weirdos.

Night’s falling and we’re heading for the traditional Saxon village of Cisna˘dioara. On the drive from Sibiu Airport, I look out the window and spot a woman pushing a pram. Stood under a street light, she’s frantically crossing herself. Is there a vampire clinging to our car roof? I almost hope that there is … but nope. Turns out that’s just what religious people here do whenever they walk past a church or a shrine. I keep seeing wooden crucifixes by the side of the road. Some have ornate shelters over them to keep them dry. There are a lot of these crosses, so if you’re a vampire and you fancy coming here to find your roots, I suggest you use the back streets.

It all looks like a film set, which reminds me of how many people think Transylvania (meaning ‘beyond the woods’6) is a fictional place – like Orwell’s Oceana or Thomas the Tank Engine’s Sodor – but it’s very real. The region has a rich and complicated history, going back, as far as written records tell us, to 1075. Yet in the global mind, it’s the land of forbidding castles, howling wolves and vampires. I mean, Brussels probably has a rich and complicated history, so does Kazakhstan, but I have no desire to celebrate my 40th there. Or even my 50th. (I’ve got Salem, Massachusetts pegged for that.)

We reach our village and it ticks my creepy-boxes instantly. The winding, sloping streets are mostly made of dirt, and the creaking Saxon houses have gates just wide enough for a horse and cart to trundle through. Grizzled-looking farmers in tracksuits and woolly hats rock gently on the back of horse-drawn carts, which make the sort of clip-clop sound you hear in old movies. I see the men chewing, and rubbing tired hands across their brows. The fields are stacked with hay. I can smell it in the air, and right next to where we’re staying, up on a high hill, I spot a fortified church, bold against the growing night. It’s not exactly a castle, but it’s brooding enough for me to paint it as Dracula’s little holiday home (for when he comes to feed on the villagers).

We arrive and dump our stuff in the bedrooms where the ceilings are low and the floors creak like old witches wailing. I’m chuffed about these little details and get even happier when I open my bedside drawer. There’s a wooden crucifix in it, as well as a head of garlic and an Egyptian Ankh: the hieroglyphic symbol that means ‘life’. I guess the owners aren’t taking any chances. We nip to the tiny residents-only bar and try out a local brew called Tuica. It’s a fast-track-to-tipsy drink, so soon we’re all giggling and chatting through our itinerary. Conversation eventually gets to the classic question when meeting new people: What do you do? We’ve got PR execs, managers in software firms, housewives and lawyers. Then someone hands me a pint of local lager and asks, ‘How about you, Peter? What do you do?’

‘Well, technically,’ I take a quick sip, ‘I’m a church minister.’

Ta-dah!

There it is, that look again. Only this time even the horror fans are frowning.

Someone snorts. They don’t believe me. ‘Are you really?’

I nod again, because I really am ordained. I’ve done the whole Bible College thing: three years’ study and three years’ probation. I tick the ‘Rev’ box on government forms, and I’ve trained and served in various churches. I’ve conducted weddings, I’ve buried people (officially and legally you understand – when you say you love the macabre it’s always important to clarify that), and I’ve preached sermons on the Bible and prayed for world peace. These days I spend most of my time writing, so I’m not in charge of a particular congregation, but I still regularly lead church services across the country. I don’t tend to wear a dog collar though, so I guess, like my love of horror, my profession isn’t so easy to spot for the passer-by.

‘And you’re here?’ one of them says. ‘That’s … unusual.’

This combo is hard to compute. I get that. God’s into forgiveness, while horror loves vengeance; washing away sins vs bathing in blood; the Holy Ghost vs spooks in the attic. Which means the worlds of faith and fright aren’t often mentioned in the same breath. In fact, they’re usually treated like those awkward guests you get at parties, who should never be seated together in case they kick off: Faith, you sit on that table, and, Fright, you are waaaay over in the corner. Don’t you dare look at each other, and you must never, ever dance … at least not together.

In my line of work, I’ve seen this clash between faith and fright a fair bit. The vast majority of my Christian colleagues have accepted my interests, but I’ve also had my share of Christian books thrust into my hand by concerned believers. They say things like: Horror movies are portals for Satan! I’ve heard sermons against the demonic power of heavy metal power chords, and once, when touring England and Germany with a band, we played in a church where the vicar insisted we put the drum kit under the cross, ‘to sanctify the beat’. I’ve had a friend get shouted at for reading Stephen King’s It at a Christian festival. And I was recently interviewed by a Christian radio show host, who asked for a prayer before meeting me – just in case I was demonically possessed.

It’s this sort of reaction that explains why many horror fans would never dream of setting foot in a church. They assume they’ll be told to burn off their Freddy Krueger tattoo or to stop dressing like a vampire. It’s the same for those interested in the paranormal. I’ve met serious ghost hunters and parapsychologists who tried out church, only to reject it because the vicar told them an interest in spooky things was a no-no. A comment that ironically suggests God has no interest in the supernatural. So, yes, in many people’s heads, faith and fright don’t mix.

Just look at how Christians reacted when the movie Black Christmas came out. This 2006 remake about a psychopath chopping up women in a sorority house on Christmas Eve had the Christian Coalition of America spitting out their eggnog. They objected to the content, like the bit when a girl gets scalped with an ice skate. But they especially despised the release date: Black Christmas opened in cinemas on the 25th of December. Dimension Films pitched it as ‘the ultimate slay-ride’. Geddit? Christian campaigner and Catholic mother-of-nine Jennifer Giroux saw no place for horror in the holidays. ‘It’s not enough to ignore and omit Christmas,’ she said in an interview with Reuters, ‘but now it has to be offended, insulted and desecrated. Our most sacred holiday, actually a holy day, is being assaulted.’7

Is that what all this morbid culture is? An assault on decency? I personally know a hundred Christians who’d applaud that statement and say: Too right, Jennifer! I also know plenty of atheists who have similar concerns about my interest in scary culture. Maybe even you might glance up from these pages and think: Hang on, Reverend. I’m a pretty cool cat and all but … an ice skate scalping a woman at Christmas time … and you’re down with that?

The assumption is that when I say ‘Horror rules!’, people think I actually mean to say ‘real-life murder is the tops!’ or ‘I genuinely want to eat a Frenchman’s brain.’ Something psychotic, anyway. They see me preaching a sermon and shaking the hands of the congregation afterwards, but then picture me going home to watch people’s heads getting hammered in, while I rub my knees like a homicidal pervert. Let me settle this once and for all. I do not rub my knees when I’m watching anything on TV. That’s weird, and people who do that should be avoided. But do I sometimes curl up on the sofa like a regular person, while watching wince-inducing grisly content? Yep.

Case in point: I watched a slimy horror movie recently called Contamination, from 1980. In it, Martian eggs spurt green goo at people, which makes their stomachs explode in bloody slow-motion. There’s a scene where scientists test this deadly alien yoke on a white lab rat. It scurries inside its Perspex container while the scientists watch and wait, the camera lingers, the viewer leans in, and then … Boom!

The white rat turns bright red in an explosion of blood.

It’s hokey, it’s daft, and it’s not a real rat, but do I rewind just to see it one more time? I do.

Now bear in mind that I hate real violence. Actual uninvited pain-infliction troubles me deeply. Real violence scares me. I even suspect it freaks me out more than it does others. I sometimes skim-read newspapers because I hate starting my weekend thinking about some real guy getting stabbed in a nightclub doorway. So, instead, I’ll watch a film in which an actor gets stabbed in a nightclub doorway. Or I’ll turn off a news report about someone being shot in the head because it makes me sad. Then I’ll play a video game shooting zombies in the head.

To me, examples of real horror and their simulated, morbid counterparts are two completely different phenomena. And to love one does not imply love of the other. But not everybody sees it that way. For many, macabre entertainment and evil behaviour are a dangerous, inseparable double act.

On the 14th of December 2012, Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother in Newtown, Connecticut. Then he drove her car to Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed twenty children and six adults. I, along with everybody else, was appalled. In the bleak days that followed, the usual narrative kicked in: scary films and violent video games were the real culprits. His online ‘kill’ count was printed on the Daily Mail website (83,000 gaming kills including 22,000 ‘head shots’).8 Twenty-year-old Lanza was just another in a long line of school shooters supposedly programmed by sick, morbid entertainment. David Duke (the former member of the House of Representatives, conspiracy theorist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan) wrote a blog post four days after the Lanza shooting with the title: ‘The 20 school-kids at Sandy Hook: Murdered by Hollywood, Not Guns!’9

It came as a surprise to some then, when it was discovered that Lanza obsessed over family-oriented video games like Dance Dance Revolution. He spent hours in a cinema lobby playing it, perfecting his moves.10 Yet he did have some violent games, too. Also, in an age where all online content gets stored, we can access Lanza’s posts on internet forums where he discusses, among other things, centipedes, school shootings and movies.11 He lists his favourite 25 films and they’re almost all obscure horrors from the 70s and 80s. I read the list and recognised almost all of them. In fact, two of my personal favourites are on there: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) and Pin (1988), two surprisingly touching stories of lonely individuals gradually going mad.

I remember reading through Dr Duke’s blog post feeling it all seemed a bit knee-jerk. Yet the idea of horror warping people doesn’t go away easily, and there was something about the blog post that I found hard to shake. It wasn’t so much what he said but a photograph he used at the top left of the post. A sweet little girl with a cute smile and long blonde hair tumbling over her cardigan. Next to it Duke had written a single line in bold:

Charlotte Bacon, six years old, one of the 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook.

I think of my own daughter who’s nine. Even as I balk at the idea of mass censorship, I wonder: it’s not unreasonable, is it? For people to worry that all this morbid culture might warp society? That all these tales of vampires, ghosts and killers might just be making us humans homicidal and cruel? No, it’s not unreasonable at all, and many assume that the answer is simple – macabre culture is bad for us. Yet what about the voices that we rarely hear? The ones which say that morbid interest is a natural, even desirable human behaviour. Aren’t they worth considering too?

Tonight in Transylvania, we’ve eaten well and drunk great beer. We’ve laughed a lot and now everybody’s gone to bed. We need to be up early because we’re heading to the Carpathian mountains in the morning. We’re taking a cable car up through the snow-thick peaks to sleep in a hotel made of ice. Not exactly Dracula’s style, but an added extra I opted to go for because the pictures I’ve seen look so much like one of my favourite horror movies, John Carpenter’s Antarctic classic, The Thing (1982). While the others settle into their rooms and brush their reassuringly blunt teeth, my wife snuggles in bed to store up warmth for tomorrow.

She catches my eye: ‘Aren’t you coming to bed?’

‘Soon. I just want to pop outside for a minute.’

She yawns and turns over, while I creep out the back door. I head down some rickety wooden steps and stand alone under the stars. It’s been snowing tonight. The streets are covered in unbroken white. There’s an icy breeze in the air which is fingering my hair.

I’m here, in Transylvania, and it looks and feels the part. When we drove in earlier there were stray dogs in the street, padding up and down and circling the lamp posts. Now it’s almost midnight and most of them have gone, but I spot a few still wandering near the corner of an old house. They see me and start coming closer, punching silent paw holes in the snow. They look me over as snowflakes fall in slow motion. Then they do something that makes me jump: they start barking high into the night. But I don’t leave. I just stand there in the white street, watching them watching me. I listen to the snap of their barks and look up to the hill where the fortified church glows under a spotlight.

I wait here for a long time because one of the other guests was out here earlier and said they could hear wolves up on those wooded hills, near Dracula’s holiday chalet. To hear howling here, as dogs pad around, would freak many people out, but for me it’s like seeing a treasured gothic movie scene that I’ve watched again and again. Only now I’ve climbed into the screen to stand in it for real. I wait for a long time but don’t hear any wolves.

I hear something else instead.

The low growl of a dog.

I flick my head and stare into the darkness. It sounds close. There’s a long, unused garden behind the place we’re staying in. It’s lined with thin trees and upturned rubbish. There are lots of shadows at this time of night.

I frown but decide to follow the growling. I walk past my room where my wife is sleeping and head into the dark garden.

My eyes adjust and I stop dead. Is that a bush quivering in the dark or an animal crouching?

Some common-sense chip in my brain says: Go back to your room, idiot, but my instincts are in charge now. I stand there in the dark, hoping for howls, looking for the unseen animal, because now the mood’s so Hammer Horror, I half expect the dog to become the Count himself, morphing from the shadows to introduce himself.

Ah, Peter, he’ll whisper: I’ve been waiting for you for such a long, long time. Welcome.

I love this feeling.

It’s a world away from standing in a pulpit, as I did just two days ago – something I also love doing. Yet as I stand listening to the barking, I get this odd impression that if God really is up there, he’s probably smiling because if anyone gets me, he does. He gets all of us, after all. And he’s been kicking around so long that he knows full well that faith and fright really do dance sometimes. And they make the strangest, most beautiful moves, if you take the time to watch.

For a moment, I wonder if I’m just telling myself what I want to believe, and that he may be up there tearing his hair out, flicking the demons away from me like I’m some dumb character in a tablet game.

Nah. He digs this, I decide, and head back to the room.

I creak across the boards and climb into the warm bed, leaning in to kiss Joy goodnight. ‘How great is this?’ I whisper, but she’s asleep.

Even as I revel in this moment, questions about why I like it try to surface, like the relentless dogs outside, calling out for an answer.

Why are millions of humans fascinated with the morbid and macabre? How might I explain it?

When I get back to England, I think to myself, I’ll try to address these questions. Maybe that security guard who gave me an odd look deserves an answer. Maybe the people who fear for me need a decent explanation. Maybe my kids need one. And maybe the family of that little girl from David Duke’s photo, whose image I struggle to shake – maybe they especially need to know why some humans can be both fascinated with dark things and heartbroken by her death. And, you know what? Maybe I need that answer too.

Somewhere deep in my subconscious, an idea is seeding: that tonight is the start of a journey to map this freaky terrain out. To get to the heart of why humans would do something so odd as to love monsters, ghosts, death and gore. And to understand why lying here, in Transylvania, feels like this particular church minister’s pilgrimage. This little boy’s Holy Land.

That is a little weird isn’t it?

That journey for those answers is coming. I sense it. It’s seeping into the room like a luminous mist.

But tonight … Tonight I sleep in the shadows, smiling.

NOTES

1. Crane, Jonathan Lake. Terror and Everyday Life. California: Sage Publications, 1994. p18.

2. Plunkett, John. ‘John Whittingdale, The Horror Fan Putting the Frighteners On The BBC’. Guardian. 18th May 2015. Accessed 3rd July 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/18/john-whittingdale-culture-secretary-bbc-rupert-murdoch

3. Butler, Sarah. ‘British Retailers Spooked by Halloween Frenzy’. Guardian. 30th October 2015. Accessed 29th September 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/30/british-retailers-spooked-halloween-frenzy-shopping

4. Boyce, Lee. ‘Halloween Overtakes Valentine’s Day’. This Is Money. 24th October 2015. Accessed 13th August 2017. http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-3286170/Halloween-overtakes-Valentine-s-Day-biggest-retail-event.html

5. Rose, Steve. ‘How Post-Horror Movies Are Taking Over Cinema’. Guardian. 6th July 2017. Accessed 6th July 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/06/post-horror-films-scary-movies-ghost-story-it-comes-at-night

6. Mallows, Lucy. Transylvania. Chalfont St Peter: Bradt Travel Guides Ltd, 2013. p16.

7. Reuters. ‘Christmas Horror Movie Offends Religious Groups’. Hollywood Reporter. 16th Dec 2012. Accessed 3rd July 2017. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/christmas-horror-movie-offends-religious-146720

8. Bates, Daniel and Helen Pow. ‘Lanza’s Descent Into Madness and Murder’. Daily Mail. 1st December 2013. Accessed 2nd July 2017. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2516427/Sandy-Hook-shooter-Adam-Lanza-83k-online-kills-massacre.html

9. Duke, David. ‘The 20 Schoolkids At Sandy Hook: Murdered by Hollywood, Not Guns!’ DavidDuke.com. 18th December, 2012. Accessed 2nd July 2017. http://davidduke.com/the-20-schoolkids-at-sandy-hook-murdered-by-hollywood-not-guns/

10. Berger, Joseph and Marc Santora. ‘Chilling Look at Newtown Killer, but No Why’. The New York Times. 25th November 2013. Accessed 4th July 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/nyregion/sandy-hook-shooting-investigation-ends-with-motive-still-unknown.html

11. Coleman, Reed. ‘Adam Lanza’s “Shocked Beyond Belief” Posts’. schoolshooters.info. 16th December 2014. Accessed 1st July 2017. https://schoolshooters.info/adam-lanzas-shocked-beyond-belief-posts

CHAPTER TWO

THEATRE OF BLOOD

I’m in the woods at night, staring at a woman in agony. She’s called Mia, and I met her about an hour ago. Even then, I had a feeling she’d end up like this.

Her hand is trapped beneath an upturned car, and she’s desperately trying to yank it free, because another woman is coming. The maniac. I see her sliding on her belly through the wet grass. Mia sees her too and screams. It’s lashing down with red rain.

With a pitiful sob Mia yanks her arm as hard as she can. Skin splits, bones crack. She’s free, but the hand stays under the car, severed and twitching. Mia somehow gets to her feet while the slithering woman slides close and pushes herself up. She growls: ‘I’ll feast on your soul.’

A chainsaw chugs on the wet grass. Mia stuffs her spurting stump into the handle for ballast. ‘Feast on this, motherfucker!’ She shoves the spinning blade straight into the maniac’s forehead.

Boom!

It’s a volcano of blood. It’s Mount Vesuvius spewing up innards from a body in spasm. This is the moment that makes me stop and look away from the screen. It’s not because I’m disgusted (though it is pretty disgusting). It’s not that I’m shocked (though the intensity of it is startling). The reason I turn away is because something is happening in the cinema, something that might be considered even more terrifying than the images on the screen.

The audience is cheering.

It’s Tuesday night and we’re in the Vue Cinema, Leicester Square, London. It’s a press screening of the remake of The Evil Dead, an 80s horror classic about crazed demons who torment and murder Americans in a secluded cabin. At one point, a woman gets raped by a tree.

The chainsaw hacks through the woman’s head for a whole seventeen seconds, which gives me ample time to watch the watchers. The cinema is full of newspaper journalists, magazine columnists and online reviewers. They probably got decent grades at school. They’re civilised types. Some are slapping hands across eyes, but most of them are smiling so much I can see their teeth flashing in the light. They laugh into fists. One guy whoops in delight. Ultraviolence flashes onto their eyes and most people look … happy.

Back onscreen, Mia is sobbing now, as she finishes her epic sawing. The carnage finally stops, and the cinema fills with applause.

The last time I saw a cinema audience slap their hands together like this was when E.T. made those BMX bikes whiz over the heads of baffled grown-ups. Even now, when I watch that Spielberg moment, I want to hop out of my seat and shout: ‘YES!’ Only right now, it isn’t a lovable, big-eyed alien that’s pressing everybody’s life affirmation buttons. It’s this young woman, drenched in blood, towering over a body that jerks and trembles then peels apart. I watch one half of the corpse flop to the left, the other half to the right.

Fffffft.

This film has given us something rare: a sense of communal exhilaration. People feel alive tonight as they spill out into a cold Leicester Square.

And it was a chainsaw to the face that did it.

I write a monthly column for a British magazine called Fortean Times. Heard of it? Don’t worry. It’s often lurking on newsagents’ shelves, tucked behind the better-known titles. The magazine has explored ‘The World of Strange Phenomena’ since the 1970s, and it’s inspired by the work of Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932). He was an American writer and researcher with a thick, strong-man moustache. Fort worried that scientists were actively suppressing anomalous data, or at least playing it down, so he set out to log and chart ‘the freaky stuff’ in life. The aberrations of human experience. Essentially, that’s what the magazine still does today.

Think Fortean and you’re under the lights of a UFO or you’re seeing the face of a ghost, hovering in a family photo. You’re measuring the forest footprints of Bigfoot, or logging which religious statues weep the most milk. In recent months, we’ve covered the surge in homeless cannibalism, the recent boom in church-sanctioned exorcism, and the growing number of murder cases inspired by the fictional internet meme known as ‘Slenderman’. Yes, we’ve run jokey sounding articles too, like ‘50 Shades of Grey: The Hidden History of Alien Sex Pests’, but this is scholarly, well-researched investigation into strange and unusual news stories.

I write articles for them, but I’m also the Fortean Times’s regular horror guy. Squished into the back pages, I review scary movies each month. It makes sense that the mag covers horror films since their themes are so often Fortean: it’s a genre that thrives on the supernatural.

In the light of my Evil Dead experience, Fort is making me wonder about the audiences of these films. And the makers too. I saw a few hundred people applaud a chainsaw murder tonight. In the case files of normal human behaviour, might that not be filed under ‘anomalous data’? Could those seventeen seconds be classed as ‘unexplained’? Or weird, at least?

I was a kid when the original version of The Evil Dead hit video stores. This was the early 1980s and, if you saw the mainstream response to it at the time, the answer was clear: people who enjoyed this sort of film were swivel-eyed sickos. Major newspapers, appalled at the influx of these so-called Video Nasties, led the fight to wipe them from society. In July 1983, the Daily Mail ran their famous front page with the call to: ‘Ban Video Sadism Now!’1 The government agreed and, for a while, shop owners who stocked the uncut version of the Evil Dead had their copies seized under the Obscene Publications Act. They could face prison. Seventy-one other films were also deemed too extreme for the public to see.

In 1993, a second wave of horror-panic hit Britain with the horrendous murder of the toddler, James Bulger. The case was famously (if tenuously) linked to the film Child’s Play 3 (1991), about a homicidal doll called Chucky. The outcry was so great that a few MPs even told Parliament that any film over a PG certificate should be banned on home video – even for adults.2 This radical solution was never put into motion, but horror films were still routinely cut or even banned outright – because the public (and especially children) needed protection.

But that was the 80s and 90s, which feels like ancient history. Now you just have to wander down the DVD aisle of your local supermarket to see how much we’ve changed. Today you can buy the original, uncut Evil Dead in garden centres. I’ve seen kind old ladies in charity shops hand it over to shoppers. This 2013 remake (which is way more brutal and way bloodier than the original) has had no hint of a ban. The British have relaxed over Child’s Play too. At one point, it was the most hated film in Britain with the power to re-program children into killers. Yet I just tapped ‘Chucky’ into the Tesco Direct website to find that you can buy a full character costume on there. The website shows a picture of the Child’s Play killer, waving a blade in the air, alongside the item description:

INCLUDES: Top, Dungarees and Mask

MATERIAL: 100% Polyester

EXCLUDES: Knife and shoes

REVIEWS: Sean, 14. Great! This product was great value for money. And much better than I was thinking it would be.

THEME: Disney

SUB THEME: Disney Frozen

Next I scroll through Google and find all the Hello Kitty versions of Chucky, which come as either a toy, a shoulder bag or a box of spicy corn treats. The gore that shocked and appalled society from the early 80s to the late 90s doesn’t cause anywhere near the same fury as before.

Yes, some voices do still complain about violence in modern entertainment – but general audiences seem to have become acclimatised to onscreen carnage. Gore-laden TV shows like Hannibal and Game of Thrones revel in a level of brutality that up until recently wouldn’t have even been legal. Yet today you’ll find them advertised on billboards and supermarket shelves. The TV show The Walking Dead features genuinely shocking scenes of violence, like when a zombie bites into a dude’s eye and rips it from the socket, with no cutaways. Hasbro now do a Walking Dead-themed Monopoly set.

Those folks who love simple answers are going to come to a swift, easy conclusion about all of this: the human race is growing more perverse. It’s the whole pigs-in-their-own-filth argument – the dirtier we get, the less we notice how polluted we are. But what if the presence of all this horrific drama isn’t a sign that we’re getting more uncivilised? What if it’s a symptom of the exact opposite? What if this genteel audience cheering at a chainsaw death isn’t a display of growing depravity, but is actually a sign of ingenious human progress? I can see your face twitching a little. You look confused. So for this to make sense, we’re going to need to go back.

Way back.

Human beings are funny. They believe things that don’t reflect the facts. (I’m a Christian, so, believe me, I get that accusation a lot.) For instance, it’s not hard to spot the idea that: the world is getting more depraved and violent. Listen in to coffee shop conversations, leaf through newspapers, or scroll through Facebook feeds. It won’t be long until you find the ‘What the hell is this world coming to?’ line buzzing from old and young. Conservative American radio talk-show host Dennis Prager makes this notion crystal clear on his website: ‘I cannot imagine any thinking person who does not believe the world is getting worse.’3 He argues that the number of refugees and terrorist attacks are growing out of control today, and sees that as slam-dunk evidence that the planet is descending into violent anarchy.

Millions would agree with him, and maybe you do, too, because it’s hard not to think that the world is getting more screwed up. Our screens are filled with rolling news images of death. We even have video games like Grand Theft Auto 5, which lets players mow down pedestrians with their car, or beat people to death with a baseball bat. It seems natural to turn to one another, and shudder, saying: The human race is growing drunk on blood; the planet is more dangerous than ever.

Cue wistful looks and a projector flicking up sepia images of the past. Ah, if only we could get back to the 1980s, when PacMan just gobbled up ghosts – he didn’t beat their brains out with a bat. Or we reach for the 1960s, when everybody was kissing geraniums and dancing to Leonard Nimoy albums. That was the time of love, we say. No rapey trees there! Or we go back to the pretty, pastel tones of the 40s and 50s when police didn’t hunt for suicide bombers or break into crack dens – they helped you find your lost cat instead. We pine for the years when, even in wartime, our country was one of the good guys. TV shows fuel this nostalgia bubble. We watch Downtown Abbey or Call the Midwife,