Topic 4 — Genre

For over 30 years now genre has become an important part of film study and is quite often characterized either singularly or to multiple combinations. When a film is released it is characterized into a specific genre for example; Comedy, Horror, Action, Romance etc. But on occasion, the term ‘sub-genre’ appears, generally to refer to groupings of these genres such like; ‘romantic comedy’, ‘psychological horror’, ‘dark fantasy’ and many more. From the beginning of the idea of genre, genre was only considered a method to place films into classifications on accordance to the conventions they displayed. Although over the year’s genre has continued to change and evolve, consequently altering and extending upon the conventions initially assigned to them. Personally I enjoy science-fiction films. I love how in a science fiction you can be taken to parallel universes, I feel that there is so much more room for imagination and creativity.

One of my favourite science-fiction genre films is ‘The Maze runner’, these films are fascinating to me as you follow the main character into this alternate universe full of secrets, missions and intense chase/ battle sequences. Genre over the years has grown and evolved and now in modern day society resonates, as an extremely important aspect of film production. Hollywood cinema has certainly benefitted from the genre system hence why it has stuck around and become a broadly used term that almost everyone understands when in the context of film.

The slideshow below provides all the genres and different conventions as well as the pros and cons of the theory of genre.