For the past 18 months, horror-fan and priest Peter Laws has been on a wild mission to understand why humans have a morbid streak. The result is a fun and frightening romp through our macabre curiosities. From the hills of Transylvania to the catacombs of Rome, he's interviewed women who collect serial killer’s hair, men who sleep on mortuary slabs and self-proclaimed vampires who drink their boyfriend’s blood. He's been strapped into an electric chair by the BBC in Somerset, he’s hunted werewolves in Hull and been chased by zombies through the nuclear bunkers of Essex.

In this talk Peter Laws explores our pleasure in stories of violence and brutality uncovering whether this appetite for morbidity is for its own sake or in order to find safe ways of dealing with that which frightens and disturbs us?  Do we perhaps gaze into the dark, simply because it’s fascinating? Maybe our attraction to the grim and the ghoulish might not be so much a sign of our depravity, but our humanity.