[Review] The Frighteners: Our Cultural Fascination With the Macabre
The Frighteners: A Journey Through Our Cultural Fascination with the Macabre Author: Peter Laws
Release Date: March 22nd 2018
Icon Books
The Frighteners has been on my wishlist since it’s release and the two-year wait to read it was completely worth it. Although when it arrived I cringed once I saw the Reverend before the author’s name, somehow I had failed to notice this before buying it. Well, Reverend Peter made me see how ridiculous my religious prejudice had been and I won’t lie, I felt incredibly ashamed of my hasty judgment.
The book is not only well written but also funny as hell, it’s my favorite read of the year so far. Laws is witty and carefree. He has had so many unique experiences and interviewed an array of interesting people (from murderabilia sellers to a woman who claims to be an actual werewolf). Above all else, the Reverend sounds like one of the coolest people I’ve ever heard of. For his 40th birthday he went to Transylvania with his wife for a “Dracula themed” holiday experience. His writing research also involved: hunting for a werewolf in the streets of Hull with a local historian, taking part in a BBC documentary about fear (Meet the Humans), visiting a mortuary to see the preparation of a body for a funeral, going to a furry convention, ghost hunting at a cemetery (with the previously mentioned historian), taking part in an immersive zombie experience in a “secret nuclear bunker and, finally, visiting the Capuchin Crypt with his family in Rome.
He explores a vast number of topics in his work, from the origins of zombies to the spiritualist movement, and backs up his views with historical facts, research, and interviews with specialists. Among the subjects covered in the book are: how violence and death have always been a part of our culture, how fear is wired in our brains since birth and how useful it is, our relationship with death and the dead, the origins of zombies and its cultural ramifications, serial murderers and murderabilia culture, werewolves, furries, vampires, children’s relationship with horror, ghosts and the spiritualist movement.
The chapters can be read in any order the reader desires, and each one covers a different topic within the broader subject of the Macabre. They are paired up with the activity mentioned above so that the chapter intertwines his findings and opinions on the topic with his experiences and the interviews he conducted. That put together with Laws’ writing style makes for a light and pleasant reading, as ironic as that may sound when considering the subject the book approaches. Every time the topics seem to get a bit too heavy, the Reverend switches back to recount one of his adventures or inserts a funny remark about his opinion on the subject at hand. However, that does not mean that he makes light of said topics, nor does he tries to downplay the impact that violence has in our society, he tries his best to understand the life choices/views of everyone he talks to, no matter how unusual their practices may be.
There were only two negative points for me, one being that it was too short for my taste, the author didn’t develop his arguments properly and his overview of the morbid ends up pretty limited because of that. For example, it does not cover witches at any point in the book, even though they are one of the central figures in the horror sphere, not to mention the historical ramifications of witch hunts that could have been explored. My other critique concerns the last chapter, Sister, and how it correlates horror narratives with religion claiming how horror movies are almost religious parables. Maybe it’s because I’m iffy when it comes to religion (as a queer woman my relationship with Christianity has not been the best), but I found most of the chapter to be bland and shallow compared to the previous ones, which were extensively researched. Apart from those things I have no complaints and highly recommend that anyone interested in horror (or, in Laws’ words, the macabre) pick up this book, at the very least, reading about the Reverend’s adventures will be a blast.
Marina Garrido
