'Horror is my safe space' — Ghoul tourist, Peter Dunne on why Halloween and scary movies are best
Peter Dunne and Liam Geraghty of the Petrified podcast.
Peter Dunne loves Halloween. He loves the scary movies and the special events such as Farmaphobia in Meath. He even loves the shade of orange we associate with the day — it’s a Pavlovian response. He’s set to fly to Los Angeles the day after we talk: his itinerary includes Universal Horror Nights and Knott's Scary Farm. “It's literally just to spook myself out for a couple of weeks,” he says of the trip.
Dunne calls himself a ghoul tourist. Whereas some of us might eye up the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Buildings for our holidays, Dunne heads to the Amityville house and Sleepy Hollow in New York; Salem in Massachusetts; and New Orleans. He explains matter-of-factly: “I'd go on holidays with my family when I was young, but then I'd look for 'did anything weird happen in this town?' And then I take a stroll down.”
His favourite place is Bran Castle in Transylvania — the basis for Dracula's castle. “This is a connection with Irish horror and Irish history. And this is what inspired the creation of one of the greatest and, I think, most adapted characters of all time. So it was lovely being there, having that link to Ireland while also having a link to horror as well.”
Scary movies, meanwhile, offer Dunne a link with his grandfather. “It's a weird contradiction because horror is kind of my safe space. So when I was small, I would have been a bit of a home bird, a big reader, I wouldn't really go out much. And so what I would do is I would watch loads of horror movies with my granddad; we'd watch all the old Hammer Horrors — Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and stuff like that. I would associate that with a feeling of comfort and being loved and safety, sitting there watching horrors with my granddad. And then when he passed away, I would watch those films to remind me of him. And then what happened was, in a weird way, watching these scary things gave me comfort, and made me feel better.”
Consuming so many scares, though, does he feel immune to them?
Sometimes, but he loves the chase of excitement, adrenaline, and "that feeling when you're actually frightened”, comparing it to being at the highest point of the roller coaster and wondering why you’re doing it. And then it drops.
“I suppose it's like anything else, when you watch a lot of something, your tolerance probably goes up.”
Dunne is the creative mind behind , a horror fiction anthology podcast that tells “the chilling tales of ordinary people encountering the supernatural”. Produced by Liam Geraghty, there are 20-plus episodes to date, with scary stories revolving around ghost estates, tourist bus trips, and the 12 pubs of Christmas.
“I was trying to think of things that set us apart,” says Dunne. “And it's the fact that we're Irish, there's so many different things, so why not knuckle in on that? And I really wanted to look at our relationship with horror because Irish people would be good at it — everybody's friend or auntie has a weird story about something that happened in the house.”
A theatre writer, Dunne says he’s always wanted to toy with the audience’s expectations, something that goes to an early play called that’s jumbled around and ends at the beginning. He ran an underground film night entitled , “leading a hardy group of souls to an undisclosed location, to watch a secret shock film”. This actually led to him meeting Geraghty, and together they created , a supernatural audio tour of a city that takes listeners around in the shape of a rune, cursing themselves in the process.
naturally grew out of all this. On October 25, the cast — Ali Fox, Margaret McAuliffe, and Anna Shiels McNamee — will record a live episode in front of an audience at the Laughter Lounge in Dublin, with a Q&A afterward. Naturally, Dunne doesn’t want to give away too much — expect lots of twists — but it’s just the latest notch in his belt. They’re in the “baby stages” of talks with a production company about making a film based on the podcast, while he’d also love to do it for theatre. “ has been the thing that has given me the most joy.”
