Concepts of Genre

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Steve Neale has said that the relationship of conventions and their expectations in genre are in a continuous circle, going between the industry, text and subject.


One of the most important things genre needs to have is a familiarity with their audience. That is to say there needs to be something that the audience can relate to and/or that they have seen before. This is very important as if it is so far removed from what they are watching they will not enjoy it or understand. Also there needs to be repetition of key elements or themes with in the same genre. As with repetition comes a sustained ease and comfort to watching or reading any media, we don't want the audience to feel uncomfortable as they want to enjoy or find pleasure in what they are consuming. However we don't just want the films to be consistently the same as each other, so we need some variation - without variation the audience becomes desensitised to what is being shown to them. As well as having variation with films there needs to be variation with what the studios produce. If we only have horror films for the next 5 years we, as the audience, will become desensitised, uninterested and bored of that genre of film.


I believe that the most limiting type of genre is the sub-genre, yes you are building upon other past films with in that genre, however you can't branch out and make the film more than two dimensional. It becomes to repetitive and familiar without variation, which makes it very easy to guess what happens next. An example of this is in a romance, boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl fall out and don't talk and at the end of the film boy and girl get back together, the audience does not even need to go and see the film as they already knows what is going to happen.


When starting to undertake research into thrillers I need to consider what type of thriller genre, if that would be the conspiracy thriller, crime thriller or even political thriller. Then after that I need to research in to the conventions of that sub-genre and analyse other past films of that same sub-genre. What shots do they use? How are these shots different from each other type of sub-genre? What is the music like for each? How does the Mise-en-scéne play its part to create the mood for that sub-genre? [Update] What are the main themes and issues, iconography, character development, and setting in each of the sub-genre films. Also I will need to research into the other type of genre, Hybrids. What are the main element of a hybrid film? What is the Camera, Sound, Editing Mise-en-scene like?


I feel that being given a brief of only doing thriller is a good thing as we have a starting point something to work with. Anyway the film crew is given a brief of what genre they are creating so I don't see that it is limiting to have a set genre but a positive, something to start with.