10 Scary Things of 2010

From the Horror Blogger Alliance, the first of our end-of-year special list things

10. Human Centipedes: For many people, 2010 is the year of The Human Centipede. Not a very good movie but a beautifully disgusting concept to be sure. The Human Centipede combines grisly torture guff with scat porn. I first sawCentipede advertised as a porno, actually ("2 GIRLS ONE GUY GO ASS-TO-MOUTH"). And now there is actually a Human Sexipede. It ne ver could quite live up to that reputation, but Director Tom Six gives it a helluva shot. Bring on the Full Sequence.

9. A Horse: A ha ha ha ha haaa, look, the 24-year-old man's scared of My Little Pony. Shut up and think about it. Last week I had the misfortune of being packed away to a works' weekend in the country. This involved barbeque, camping and orienteering excercises. Being an idiot, yours truly was quickly quite lost. Much of it resembled an episode of L O S T. I wandered around the woods for a good two hours, drenched by rain and under attack from smoke monsters (well, chain smoking idiot colleagues). And then there were the horses. During our misadventures, we ended up traipsing through a big empty field. Well, empty save for the fucking horses. Lots of horses with big horsey penises. I'm not ashamed to admit that the thought of death by horse rape crossed my mind. Until you've had the thousand-yard-stare from a horse, you don't know fear. One of them whinnied and I shat myself.

7. This Is England 86: Shane Meadows' TV sequel to his seminal This Is England movie, England 86 picks up the story ten years later and, episode by episode, emotionally devastates his audience. A man with an evil beard commits two of the most horrible rape sequences I've ever seen. Johnny Harris' Mick is, for my money, the best villain of 2010, and decidedly not in a good way. As much as it adds to the plot and aids Combo's eventual redemption arc, it's a little too overpowering and threatens to derail the whole thing. I actually feel dirty even thinking about it.

6. 2012: Not the movie, which was shitty, but the year. I read Lawrence E. Joseph's Apocalypse 2012 in September, and it actually terrified me. Until I realised that I don't believe in that sort of thing, closed the book and read something about superheroes instead. Still, I'm an idiot and I think I'm going to keep expecting the world to end all the way until 2013. Then I'll find something else to worry about instead.

5. Shitty movies: 2010 has been a bad year for horror. Take a bow Eclipse, 2001 Maniacs: Field Of Screams, Nightmare 2010, Vampires Suck and news of a Buffy remake. Even scarier is the amount of money (most of) those movies made. Really, humanity? This is just like that documentary I watched... Idiocracy.

4. My own mortality: My 2010 kicked off on a bit of a bummer with the tragic death of my brother (too tragic to joke about that one line there nearly rhyming, so don't) and the following funeral. Sorry to bring the mood down, but this site sucks anyway so it's not as if you're here for the shits and giggles. In fact, I don't think there is anyone actually here. Anyway, prior to losing my kid brother, I think I'd sort of assumed that I'd live forever. This year, I learned that I won't. Scary stuff. This one should be #1 on the list actually, but I'd rather not end it on such a downer....

3. The Taint: Simply put, ew. Every bit as disgusting and horrible as The Human Centipede should have been. Hands down my favourite bit of independent horror this year. And I'm not just saying that because they sent me a DVD.

2. Not Freddy Kreuger: So not-scary that it made #2 on my list of the scariest things of 2010. Did we need to see Fred Krueger wailing like a big girl's blouse as the vengeful parents of Springwood immolate him? No we did not. Furthermore, I could've done without that crappy makeup, unimaginative dream sequence and drippy blanket of a final fight. Nightmare 2010: so not scary that it's actually scary.

1. JUSTIN BIEBER: A Lovecraftian little fuck if ever there was one, Justin Bieber represents to me the dumbing down of pop, the mass stupiddening of teenage girls worldwide and the rise of a hairstyle phenomenon known as "the Bieber". And yes, the child does actually, physically scare me. Literally the only good things to have come from JB in 2010 are (1) That South Park skit (2) Someone throwing a bottle at his head (3) Him walking into a door and saying "ow". The scariest moment of the Bieber zeitgeist? When I heard a Galaxy FM presenter compare JB playing Manhattan to Elvis in Vegas. Fuck humanity.