Genre Analysis

The concept of genre is important for everyone including film critics, film makers and audiences as well as media theorists. A lot of studies have been carried out in order to categorise films through various paradigms as well as into how much that categorisation informs our understanding of a film as a text.

Genres are determined by a set of codes and conventions and have no fixed boundaries and many films nowadays do not just belong to one genre. There are now lots of different sub-genres within the main genre types like rom-coms (romantic comedies) or physical comedies etc. The same goes for horror genres. We now have hundreds of different subgenres which fall under the horror genre: slasher, zombie, supernatural, demons, vampires, serial killers and that’s just to name a few. All of these do however need to share some properties of the genre like the narrative so the plot and storylines are often familiar to emphasise the overall genre. There are similar types of characters i.e. final girl, sexually promiscuous girl, benefactor, monster etc. the films often share the geographical setting etc. All of these emphasise to the audience what genre the film they are watching is.

The two ways to identify film genre is to approach it from a descriptive or a functional point of view. The first involves viewing a film as belonging to a category or a genre. This requires the film to share similar attributes with other films in the same category. Our film can be identified using the descriptive approach as it does share values of other slasher film genres. It has the final girl, which is represented as the quiet and pure one, the group of friends, the sexually promiscuous teenage girl, the monster etc. It is also set in the woods and takes place at night. All, or most, of these textual properties can be visible in many horror/slasher films like Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Scream, I know what you did last summer along with many others. In this way, our film trailer is similar to the others in the same genre therefore can be identified using the descriptive approach.

The second approach taken to study film genre is the functional approach where the genre film is perceived as “collective expressions of contemporary life that strike a particularly resonant chord with audiences” (Experience and Meaning in Genre Films BK Grant, Film Genre Reader 1986)

This approach sees certain patterns in horror film genres that represent the repetition of social questioning of things like what frightens us? What is criminal? What is morality? As values change, these questions have to be passed on from one generation to another therefore genre films are products of their historic context.

When these two approaches are combined, the study of genre is most effective and a film can be both a part of a paradigmatic text and a product of time and place.

When creating a film, it is also useful to look at genre from the perspective of the audience as well as the producer. It is useful as if the films are too similar to the ones that are already out, it is useful to see if the audience would be attracted to them anyway. It is also important to remember that cinema is a commercial enterprise and that once a market has been identified producers will cater for that audience’s wants and needs. The relationship between an audience and a producer is far more complicate then it seems.

The difference between the selection of texts by the audience and the producer is that the audience choose texts according to their genre especially that there are many genres appropriate to certain ages and genders in society so movies are chosen accordingly e.g. girls are more likely to opt for chick flick and boys prefer to watch sci-fi movies or action films. Audiences choose texts according to their expectations of what it is going to contain and they take pleasure in those known texts and the repetitions of the narratives and predicted resolutions. Therefore they would continuously go back to the genres they know and enjoy.

The producers select texts in ways that will benefit their product. They market texts according to genre as an audience for that genre has already been identified a taking pleasure in the text therefore the success of the product can be determined. They also create their films based on the conventions already established for the genres e.g. a horror film including a monster, killing off the promiscuous girl first as well as filming it in a typical horror film location like the woods. This will appeal to horror movie fanatics as they will recognise the outline of the film and connect it with other horror movies. However, they also allow creativity within a given format like for example, it is an accepted convention in science fiction that spaceships create noise, even though it is well known that sound can’t travel through the vacuum that is space, but it creates excitement especially in action scenes.

In horror films, it is acceptable for teenagers to be left to their own devices without their parents interrupting their outings. The parents in horror films are usually shown going away or are not mentioned at all. In our film, this convention will be shown in our trailer as we will have a group of friends and there will be no mention of their parents who should really be worried about them going missing for the whole night but instead none of them will get so much as a call from their parent.

 

There is another way to look at genres which comes from Frank McConnell’s “Just five genres”. He based his theory around the idea that instead of analysing genres around the obvious visual cues it is more meaningful to split text accordingly to their themes and plots, in particular their leading characters. Through his research he found that since films reflect the society and the characters that play a part in it, they will always refer to certain themes and typical events from it. His five genres are:

1. The king: a character which establishes a setting and is obviously quite important to the story, also known as the epic.

2. The knight: a character which usually experiences an adventurous romance and consolidates the state.

3. The pawn: a character that is often trapped in an institutionalised state. The melodrama of the story.

4. The fool: otherwise known as the satire who responds to the madness of the state.

5. Apocalypse: This includes no single hero and represents the collapse of the state which ultimately leads to a new beginning/equilibrium.

 

McConnell’s genres may seem like something from fairy stories but they can be applied to any film of any genre as long as one of the characters, or the lead character, will fit one of those roles and the state will be represented as their family, business or empire. In many films it is quite easy to spot some of these roles like the fool in comedy films or the film ‘Independence Day’ as fitting into the apocalypse genre. And some films can fall into more than one category like ‘The Godfather 2’ which falls under the epic as the main character is the “king” and the mafia is his state and the pawn as the character towards the end of the film feels himself to be trapped in a situation he is in and believes he doesn’t have the freedom to leave his life of crime behind.

Our film trailer, like ‘The Godfather 2’, can be categorised into two of these five genres. One being the pawn as the characters in our film are trapped in the woods not being able to get away and every time they try they just end up where they started and move around in circles. There is also no way of them to escape the inevitability of death. The second genre we could apply our film to is the apocalypse. The group is first seen living a normal life and nothing remotely interesting happens to them. They are just normal teenagers leading normal lives. With Eve going missing and the way the teenagers treated her disappearance when walking by the memorial site for her their normality is broken and disturbed. With the group of the friends getting killed off one by one the collapse of their state occurs and when Nora is the only survivor, she has to re-establish a new beginning for herself. Although in our film, there is only one hero.