10: Penguins colonise dorpie

Part B horror movie, part Batman plot, penguins have demonstrated that they can in fact invade and take over a small town on the Cape coast without the aid of Danny Devito.

9: Poverty and neglect spawn serial murder

Serial killers are a stock staple of an entire genre of horror stories – so isn’t it nice to think that harsh social conditions in South Africa are perfect for producing them?

8: School boy murder video-taped

If you needed reminding how savage children can be, video footage of the gruesome and agonising death of a Pretoria high school boy was found being distributed among pupils on cellphones.

7: Rapist's life sentence overturned, ruled 'disproportionate to the crime'

A man rapes his 15 year old step daughter in the same room as her younger siblings, and the sentence was reduced because the child had “The fact that she had accepted gifts and money from the appellant (Ndou) must have played a role in her submitting to the sexual intercourse.”

6: Deadly Marburg virus kills six in Uganda

There are few things scarier than disease – and few diseases scarier than ebola and its cousins, the Marburg viruses. There is no cure, and to date the death rate is about 82%, as it eats away at the internal organs of its victims.

5: UN warns northwest Africa over desert locust swarms

There is a reason why locusts are one of the Biblical plagues. A huge swarm of bugs eating everything in their path, seemingly unstoppable as they ravage entire nations, locusts pack a big horror punch in small insect packages.

4: Boy Scouts releasing "perversion files"

The Boy Scouts of America won’t allow atheist or gay scouts because they feel such people are bad moral influences. Meanwhile the covered up known paedophiles for decades.

3: 'Incest-monster' Fritzl divorces

Josef Fritzl, is a horror story beyond what the movies would be willing to show. He wanted to protect his daughter from the evils of the outside world, so he locked her in his basement where he repeatedly raped her for decades, fathering more daughters, some of whom got to join their mother-sister in the dungeon. The kicker? This guy was genuinely hurt when his wife didn’t want to visit him in prison.

2: Six corpses found down Ivory Coast well

Sure, in the Ivory Coast that may seem like small potatoes. Now just think about one of the people using the well as a source of drinking water.

1: Cannibal cop uses police database to create potential victims list

"I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus ... cook her over low heat, keep her alive as long as possible," Valle allegedly wrote in one exchange in July, the complaint says. To protect and serve, with a side of favre beans and a fine Chianti.