In “The Most Dangerous Game,” a 1924 short story written by Richard Connell, Sanger Rainsford, a world-renowned big game hunter from New York, falls overboard on a moonless Caribbean night and washes up on the shore of a mysterious island. There, he meets General Zaroff, a fellow big game hunter who retreated to the island when he found he had grown tired of the hunt. “Hunting,” Zaroff confides over dinner in his chateau, “had ceased to be what you call a ‘sporting proposition.’ It had become too easy. I always got my quarry. Always.” On the island, Zaroff has created a new game—and found new quarry. “I had to invent a new animal to hunt,” Zaroff reveals. “And that was?” a rapt Rainsford inquires. The ideal quarry, Zaroff offers, would be able to reason. Yet no animal, as Rainsford points out, can reason. “There is one that can,” counters Zaroff. “But you can’t mean—“ gasps Rainsford in horror. “I think I may say, in all modesty, that I have done a rare thing,” Zaroff confesses to his guest—and his next day’s quarry. “I have invented a new sensation.” In Porn Valley, pornographers are hunting humans.
