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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I detest goo-movies. If the thrills depend only on bloodandgore, I pass.
If the movie is dependent on jump-scares, I pass.
I have no interest in dead-teenager movies because I am too old to have any empathy for consequences of bad decisions based on hormones.
If you want a real horror movie, try “Deliverance” or “Easy Rider”.
i am forever surprised at how unpopular horror is with people i talk to. it’s still huge, lots of people are horror fans, but of people who aren’t? they see nothing in it at all. with romance, with action, with mystery, any given person might be able to say, “it’s not my thing but that part was cool, i like that actor,” whatever. but horror gets a lot of wholesale rejection. put a couple of bats or blood drips on the box and the normiest normies jump out the nearest window to escape.
sorry if that was rude, it just gets my goat past the fiftieth time i’ve heard it
People like all kinds of genres that don’t appeal to other people. There are lots of people who can’t get enough of sappy, poorly-written, ridiculous Hallmark movies that all have the same plot. For about 15 years, you couldn’t get away from the nonstop superhero movies. I remember as a child it was westerns that were everywhere–in the movies, on tv (Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Lone Ranger, etc. etc.)–and then there was the secret agent movie genre. For a solid decade or more after Star Wars premiered, there were a whole slew of science fiction movies and television series. Some people can’t get enough of it, and others aren’t interested.
Just recently on one of Mano’s blogs, we were talking about The Haunting of Hill House. Most of the horror in that movie comes from not knowing if what’s happening is all in their minds, or really happening. I find that more horrifying than the types of movies chigau cites that she doesn’t enjoy–and if an animal is harmed in a movie, I nope right out of there.
this feels genuinely different. i could be wrong. i could be. i don’t think i am.
I don’t dislike horror films, I have even enjoyed mild horror like ‘An American Werewolf in London’, ‘Night of the Living Dead, the Hammer films, but I don’t watch it anymore. I don’t watch horror because it inevitably leads to nightmares using the imagery from the film, and I’m talking the kind of nightmare that leaves you sweaty, heart pounding, simply unable to go back to sleep, but scared to get out of bed. I do read some horror, so far none of the horror I’ve read has caused a nightmare, perhaps because my visuals when reading it aren’t as vivid as they are in a film, but mainly because I think because I don’t hear ‘horror’ music in my head, and it’s the music that gets my brain upset. I couldn’t watch Twin Peaks because the music was screwed up.
I think with any genre a long time reader may get bored of works that they would have enjoyed when new to that genre. However for me that means exploring different voices or simply better writers. I mean with romance you know where you are going to end up, you may even see the twists the writer will use ahead of their use, but if the writing is good enough it doesn’t matter. And sometimes you may want that familiarity as a bulwark against the reality that is so tiring.
american werewolf in london was extremely transgressive and gory for when it came out, wasn’t it? not exactly lon chaney jr.
i just think it’s noteworthy people feel the need to say they don’t like it or qualify which ones they accept moreso than in other genres. i’m talking about genre broadly, so maybe it invites those comments more than usual, but you can just mention any horror movie at random and get the same result.
A drug comes to be less effective on the user, requiring greater quantities of said drug to achieve the same effect…
For a while I got to know Peter Stafford, late author of The Psychedelics Encyclopedia (1992). He claimed he and a friend had coined the word “toxiphilosis” to describe that pattern; judging by a just-now DuckDuckGo search, despite clear Greek and Latin roots, it hasn’t caught on at all. (In spite, or possibly because of, him launching a campaign to “Stamp Out Toxiphilosis!”)
Oops – the first edition of The Psychedelics Encyclopedia hit the shelves in 1977.
D.A.R.E to keep kids off drugs, pierce! D.A.R.E!
I find I can read humor over and over. Terry Pratchett had a huge output of books, and I’ll pick up one at random for a tenth or twentieth read and enjoy it nearly as much as I did the first time around.
i wonder that some genres are more prone to the need for escalation than others
Well as I said I don’t feel the nightmares are worth the risk, even though I did enjoy what I have watched, so I suspect I might well enjoy more modern horror if my brain would co-operate and stop the nightmare thing.
I don’t know how transgressive ‘The American Werewolf in London’ was at the time, I wasn’t reading that sort of commentary back then, and didn’t see it in a movie theatre but on TV. I think it might have been unusual in being a comedy horror that piled on the gore in a realistic fashion? And also being a much bigger movie than was usual with horror, but hell we’re talking about what the early to mid 80s? Way too long ago for me to remember those details accurately. Though I do still remember the nightmare.
it’s the gore but also the transformation scene. prior to awil the standard in werewolf transformation was camera fades to progressively fuzzier faces. awil showed the guy’s flesh being deformed around bones as his skeleton changed shape, showed him dumping sweat and screaming in pain from the process. a quantum leap in body horror that changed the werewolf subgenre forever.