content warning:  i mention one of the worst things ever in animal cruelty and human nastiness, mutilation and death.

I first learned about drug tolerance in junior high during that DARE bullshit, u kno, Drug Abuse Resistance Education.  A drug comes to be less effective on the user, requiring greater quantities of said drug to achieve the same effect, or escalation to harder drugs.

Within the genre of horror, you can see a similar effect take place over time – an escalation to harder content to achieve the same effect.  In the early ’60s you could watch Vincent Price in The Fly and be mortified for weeks.  By the ’80s, Cronenberg’s much nastier Fly would be required.  By the ’00s, you’d probably have to watch nasty torture movies to get your chills.  The Vincent Price picture would seem quaint as a cartoon.

At the outer limits, one can imagine a genre fan becoming so jaded that the only horror that can work for them is actual horror inflicted upon their body.  Like those people with surgery fetishes, or that guy who consented to be cannibalized in Germany.

Of course, these are ridiculous outliers.  Movies aren’t drugs, and a person could be perfectly content with their own personal upper bond of terror.  Yet it does seem like you can get diminishing returns from the same level of titillation in a given genre.  The person who is content at a certain level is probably not getting as much out of the tenth movie they’ve seen at that level.

Meanwhile, there are people for whom everything will eventually become too boring, as they are inured to the experiences of life and of art.  This is probably the most true of individuals with strong powers of memory, short or long term.  This can be illustrated by a look at their opposites – people who voraciously consume media but remember nothing about it could be excited by the same trick one week after the next.  If you remember everything, you start to run out of surprises.

I thought of this because I was trying to come up with an idea for a revelation that would be genuinely surprising, scary, thrilling, whatever, for a mystery.  I remembered then that we live in a world where a crocodile scientist became a sexual serial killer of dogs.  This is not the kind of twist that you would put into a horror story because it is as depressing as it is disgusting and horrifying, but it may demonstrate for you where I’m coming from.

I found out about that from Pharyngula.  If you read Pharyngula every day and don’t remember that, good for you.  Aside from the benefit of not remembering that shit, you can also be surprised or terrified by fiction more often.  Because you likely don’t remember that stuff as well either.

Horror has been my example so far, but other emotions could be subject to the same principle.  Romance not romantic enough, mystery not mysterious enough, action not exciting enough, etc.  Must every genre naturally get used up, smoked like so many cigarettes?

Some postmodern theorist I no longer recall said we’re in the age of pastiche.  Originality is no longer possible, one must build from the elements of what has come before.  Even wacky remixes could hit a limit.  What’s left in the post-pastiche world?

It’s alright.  I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing until I’m done, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough.

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