TOP TEN 2012

[This post was originally composed for my personal blog, The Name Is Rebel. I am replicating it here for posterity's sake. As you might guess, the list would look a little different if I had written it today--but no alterations were made!]

In my time, some have called me a Movie Buff.  Some have called me a No You're Not A Movie Buff.  Regardless, I love movies.  They're one of my three favorite forms of media (novels and video games probably fill the other slots).  I live on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.  As such, I'm pleased to have viewed twenty-one films so far that were released in the good year 2012.  Of these, I present to you my top ten.  Unlike my Top 10 Books of the Year list, these are not culled from all the movies I have seen this year, but all the movies I've seen that were released in 2012.  I have no idea what all the movies I watched this year are.

So, without further ado... some preliminaries.

The Scariest Movies of My LIFE

In my continuing efforts to disavow all holidays, I will be celebrating Halloween by working at my dad's network tonight. Nonetheless, the last vestiges of my holiday spirit cropped up yesterday and demanded that I do a film-based retrospective.

So here we are. It should come as no surprise that the subject of this retrospective will be horror, one of my favorite of all movie genres. Something about the grotesque... the unknown... the tangible becoming intangible... intangible becoming tangible... it gets me.

Horror fans tend to obsess over their pet genre, tracking down obscure gems and popular turds alike for voracious consumption. My knowledge isn't nearly as encyclopedic as most horror enthusiasts, but hey, that's what the rest of my life is for. In the meantime, I'll focus on what I have experienced.

What you are about to see is not a list of the best horror films I have ever seen. You won't find horror masterpieces like The Thing, The Shining, The Cabin in the Woods, or Psycho. Rather, this is a list of the ten films that scared me the most when I saw them. It's a purely personal compilation. Well-constructed horror films are more likely to terrify, but each of us is frightened by such idiosyncratic things. Bob 1 might find insects terrifying but is unfazed by the threat of stalker psychos in a character's backyard. Bob 2 is unafraid of insects unless they talk, and unafraid of psychos unless they don't. Bob 3 finds anthropomorphic appliances disturbing on a deep existential level. It's a crapshoot: one that I find endlessly interesting. In fact, I would love to hear about your scariest movies.

I'm not a person who scares easily--it takes a lot for a movie to elicit any sort of visceral reaction from me--but we are about to embark on a tour of the ten movies that have done the most to shape the disturbances of my conscious and subconscious imagination.

As they say in the I Spy: Haunted Mansion computer game that I used to play: Enter if you dare... you're in for a scare.

Everything rhymed in that game.