The Top 10 Trends That Would Not Die In 2009 | SPIKE

2009 will be remembered for a lot of things. It was the year that Jon Gosselin proved being an incredible douchebag could be a fulltime career, Twilight: New Moon proved sh***y movies will never go out of style, and Glenn Beck proved that crazy, whacked-out, paranoid rants dressed up as rational thought are still the bread and butter of American discourse. But most of all, 2009 demonstrated that some trends are built to last.

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By Geoff Shakespeare

10. Twitter

Since first going online in 2006, Twitter.com has become as ubiquitous on the Internet as lolcats and porn. Every day, millions of tweets are posted from hundreds of countries, ranging from the ridiculously banal to the slightly less ridiculously banal. The economy's in the toilet, the world is full of social, ethnic, and political conflicts that could erupt into war at any time, the environment is on the cusp of catastrophic collapse, and a general air of malaise and dread hangs over everything. Still, over four million people want to know every little thing that pops into Ashton Kutcher's head.

I like pie!                              Source: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

Twitter isn't all bad. For starters, reformers in Iran recently used it to combat state censorship and it has made “twat” a word you can use in mixed company. Nevertheless, thanks to Twitter, for the first time in human history a service exists that allows you to instantly tell the world your thoughts and feelings in real time. That most people use it to share information even their closest friends would find mind-numbingly self-involved and boring is just a bonus.

9. Zombies

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Who would have thought that a little part of a small religion on a tiny Caribbean island would have done so well? Yes, zombies have come a long way from their humble, non-brain-eating origins. A staple of the horror genre, zombies are the little monsters that could. Ghosts may be the classy choice for scares and vampires get all the girls, but zombies just shuffle along, biting and rotting their way into our hearts. Their popularity wanes now and then, but they never stay down for long. All it takes is a little fear and a little doubt in the zeitgeist and they're right back in.

2009 had its share of fear and doubt and the zombies took notice. With the release of the kickass zombie flick Zombieland (currently the largest grossing zombie flick of all time) and the kickassier zombie video game Left 4 Dead 2 (currently the best thing ever invented by anyone, anywhere), there's never been a better time to be rudely awakened from your eternal slumber with an insatiable hunger for living flesh. Or a better time to waste those who've been rudely awakened from their eternal slumber with an insatiable hunger for living flesh.

8. Celebutants

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Let's face it. Working sucks. Wouldn't it be awesome if there was an entire industry where you could rake in big bucks for getting drunk, saying stupid things, and just being your normal, a-hole self? The sad, sad, woe-for-the-future-of-humanity truth is that there is such an industry, thousands of douchebags make millions out of it, and it was just as lucrative in 2009 as it's ever been.

Case in point, Jon Gosselin. A man who by all rights should be toiling away in obscurity at some middle management job in Pitstain, Iowa is instead making a respectable living by f***ing up in public. Gosselin started the year as a devoted husband and loving father who achieved worldwide fame for reproducing eight times. He ended it as a dirty lowdown cheater who catted around with his wife's plastic surgeon and the family babysitter. After getting kicked off the show that made him, Jon spent the rest of 2009 in fine reality star fashion...by doing everything humanly possible to stay famous.

Source: TLC

And why wouldn't he? Who would want to leave the company of such luminaries as The Kardashians, Lindsay Lohan's dad, or those jerky rich kids from The Hills? But this is one trend  that may have reached its high mark in 2009. With such high profile fame-grabbing failures as the Balloon Boy family and those two goofs who snuck into the White House, maybe people will start to realize that fame should only be reserved for those talented individuals who really deserve it. You know, like Carlos Mencia, or Lady Gaga.

7. The Mockumentary

Source: Paramount Pictures

In 1984, Rob Reiner and company first discovered that a fake documentary was a great way to get real laughs in their classic This Is Spinal Tap. 25 years later, “mockumentaries” are still going strong. A great way to wring humor from the realities of life on TV, mockumentaries have revolutionized the sitcom. In the wake of the hugely successful American version of The Office, this year saw Modern Family join it and sophmore series Parks and Recreation to critical acclaim. All of them use a single camera, have "talking head" segments, and are great examples of just how funny individual delusion, humiliation, and failure can be. As long as it isn't you.

Being a jackass in public so you don’t have to.                                   Source: ABC

But mockumentaries didn't just deliver the laughs in 2009. They served up some old school scares at the box office in the surprise hit horror flick Paranormal Activity. Even though its budget was what a normal Hollywood film spends on hair gel, Paranormal Activity spent the year piling up over $100 million by freaking people out. Paranormal Activity was shot on a couple of cameras and had special effects that wouldn't be out of place on YouTube, but it still delivered all the chills of a big budget horror movie. The secret? It's low budget and lo-fi production values made it seem all the more real. 2009 showed once again that there's nothing better than a fake documentary for making people pee their pants with laughter or poop them with terror. Okay, that’s a pretty gross analogy, but mockumentaries are still wicked.

6. Disaster Movies

Source: Centropolis Entertainment

The '70s was the decade for disaster movies. The theaters were full of bloated, washed-up movie stars at the twilight of their careers pretending to be menaced by sinking ships, towering infernos, and every conceivable natural disaster. Oh, how little has changed. 2009 saw today's hottest, bloated, washed-up movie stars at the twilight of their careers star in the granddaddy of disaster movies, 2012. There were some upgrades, sure. The special effects are a hell of a lot better, and the stakes have been raised. Just destroying one building or airplane doesn't cut it in 2009. These days, to pack 'em in the seats past opening weekend, you gotta destroy the whole effing planet.

Source: Centropolis Entertainment

Or one actor’s credibility. Either one is cool.            

2012 was a CGI orgy of earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and overacting that showed that the End of the World will be way more awesome than you ever thought possible. Cities crumbled, oceans swelled, and reasonable suspension of disbelief took the worst battering it's ever had. Despite mostly awful reviews (Peter Travers of Rolling Stone subtly referred to it as “sheer, cynical, mind-numbing, time-wasting, money-draining, soul-sucking stupidity”), 2012 has banked a healthy $711 million in worldwide box office, firmly proving that despite differences in culture, religion, and language, people all over the world love to see s*** get blown up.