Genre

Genres are cultural and industrial categories that allow us to sort

and categorize films.

Genre films are “those commercial feature films which, through

repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar
characters in familiar situations” (ix, Barry Keith Grant,
“Experience and Meaning in Genre Films,” Film Genre Reader.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
 What is genre?
“Are genres really ‘out there’ in the world, or are they merely
the constructions of analysts? Is there a finite taxonomy of
genres or are they in principle infinite? Are genres timeless
Platonic essences or ephemeral, time-bound entities? Are genres
culture-bound or trans-cultural? Does the term ‘melodrama’
have the same meaning in Britain, France, Egypt and Mexico?
Should genre analysis be descriptive or proscriptive?” (14,
Robert Stam. Film Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh:
Blackwell, 2000).
“When we suggest that a certain film is a Western, we are really
positing that a particular range of meanings will be available in
the film, and not others. We are defining the limits of its
significance. The master image for genre criticism is a triangle
composed of artist/film/audience. Genres may be defined as
patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual
films, and which supervise both their construction by the
filmmaker and their reading by the audience” (27-8, Tom Ryall,
“Teaching Through Genre.” Screen Education 17, 1975).
 Convention
Films within a genre are united by themes, subjects or
techniques.

A set of conventions unite a given genre.

Conventions can include:

Plot patterns (formula plots, stock scenes like a shootout in a

Western, etc.)

Stock character types (and typecasting of actors)

Genre iconographies (settings, objects, costumes, familiar

musical cues, etc.)

Just about every genre will use elements of film form (mise-en-
scene, cinematography, editing, sound) in different and
distinctive ways
Not every genre film is going to contain the same conventions to
the same degree.

A given convention may belong to multiple genres, but is given

meaning by its relationship to other conventions.
Not every film within a genre will demonstrate these to the same
degree, but in general, consistent conventions hold a genre
together.
Different cinematic genres appear to be defined in different
ways. They can be defined by:
Setting (Western, war film)
Emotion/reaction (horror, comedy, pornography, melodrama)
Audience (children’s film, teen film, family film)
Mode (documentary, experimental, animation)
Style (film noir)
The placing of set pieces or spectacles within a narrative (action
film, musical)
Treatment of material (drama, comedy)
Conventions can include:

Plot patterns (formula plots, stock scenes like a shootout in a

Western, etc.)

Stock character types (and typecasting of actors)

Genre iconographies (settings, objects, costumes, familiar

musical cues, etc.)

Just about every genre will use elements of film form (mise-en-
scene, cinematography, editing, sound) in different and
distinctive ways
 Genre development
Film genres often migrate from other media (literature, theatre,
comic books, etc.).

Cycles of production: A successful film produces a burst of

imitators before finally running out steam and becoming
commercially non-viable.

Subgenres: a cycle becomes so entrenched as to serve as a

lasting sub-type.
 Genre Mixing
Genre mixing is common and important, in part because it
allows fresh approaches to genre traditions and in part because it
attracts different audiences (and often different audience
genders) simultaneously.
Oklahoma! (1955)
 The Horror Film
By some definitions, the horror film is almost as old as cinema,
but it only become recognized and labeled as a genre in the
early 30’s.
The Haunted Castle (1896)
Nosferatu (1922)
The Phantom of the Opera
(1925)
The Golden Age of the America horror film was roughly 1931-
36, when Universal Pictures scores two major hits with Dracula
and Frankenstein (both 1931), strive to replicate these
successes, and inspire other studios to do the same. Around 45
U.S. horror films are produced in those years, many of them
acknowledged classics.
Universal: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932),
The Invisible Man (1932), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935),
Dracula’s Daughter (1935)

MGM: Freaks (1932), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), Mad Love

(1935), The Mark of the Vampire (1935), The Devil-Doll (1936)

Warner Bros.: Mystery of the Wax Museum (1932), Doctor X (1932),

The Walking Dead (1936)

Paramount: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Island of Lost Souls
(1932), Murders in the Zoo (1933), Supernatural (1933)

RKO: The Most Dangerous Game (1932), King Kong (1933), Son of
Kong (1933)
At least by 1933 or so, phrases like “horror film” and “horror
movie” are in common parlance, indicating a fully formed
genre.
Ashbury Park Press, April 1,
1932
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
February 3, 1933
The Indianapolis News, August
13, 1932
Production ceases on American horror films from 1936-7
despite their box office popularity due to increased censorship
concerns

However, audience demands overwhelm other industry

concerns, allowing the return of the horror film in the late
1930s. Despite some later lulls, horror films maintain a fairly
perennial popularity, and are often able to cross borders easily
and generate audiences with low budgets and the lack of major
stars.
The Return of the Repressed
Also in the 1960s and 1970s, film scholars began to
closely analyze the horror genre.

Probably the most cited reading is still Robin Wood’s “An

Introduction to the American Horror Film” (1979). Wood’s
basic formula for a horror film: “Normality is threatened
by the monster” (14).

Within his Marxist/Freudian framework, Wood sees the

Monster in a horror film as a figure of the Return of the
Repressed.
Repression, “makes us (if it works) into monogamous
heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists” (8).

Wood proposes that the “true subject of the horror genre is

the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization
represses or oppresses: its re-emergence dramatized” (10).
King Kong (1933)
As Wood notes, monsters are often linked to those things that
are made “Other” in our society (women, the proletariat, other
cultures, ethnic groups, alternate political ideologies, alternate
sexual identities, children) (10-1).
Wood divides horror films into progressive ones that embrace
the monster as a figure of social upheaval and “the reactionary
wing,” where he locates films that present the monster as strictly
inhuman and celebrate its destruction (and thus the re-
establishment of normality).
What is/are the genre(s) of Rhymes for Young Ghouls and why?

What comes out of genres being mixed here?