Genre Investigation
What is genre?
Genre could be explained as the set of expectations that an audience has for an artist composition. It is the categorizing of compositions according to its conventions or characters of its form, style or subject matter.
A text is classified in a genre through the identification of key elements (known as paradigms) which occur in that text and in others of the same genre. These paradigms range from music to costume to plot points. Audiences recognise these elements and therefore bring a set of expectations to their reading of the text accordingly.
Genre is important for both the audience and producers of the media product.
Film genre
Film genre helps the cinematic industry as a whole by helping the audience choose which film they want to see. In addition, by categorizing a film according to its genre, it allows the film to be easier to promote to a particular audience as the distributor will know specifically how to target that target audience effectively using certain conventions to target them.
Film genre also enables directors to use symbols and settings from past films within the same genre to appeal to human emotions. For example, when the characters in a scene go into a haunted house or down to a basement, a sense of fear is triggered because of past recollections of similar scenes in other films when some sort of horror took place. (Grant 1986:20)
Genre theorists:
Robert Stam, a film theorist, refers to common ways of categorising films: While some genres are based on story content (the war film), other are borrowed from literature (comedy, melodrama) or from other media (the musical). Some are performer-based (the Astaire-Rogers films) or budget-based (blockbusters), while others are based on artistic status (the art film), racial identity (Black cinema), locat[ion] (the Western) or sexual orientation (Queer cinema)
David Bordwell also notes that 'one could... argue that no set of necessary and sufficient conditions can mark off genres from other sorts of groupings in ways that all experts or ordinary film-goers would find acceptable' (Bordwell 1989) - any theme may appear in any genre.
David Chandler - conventional definitions of genre tend to be based on the notion that they comprise of particular conventions (e.g. themes or settings) which are shared by the texts which are regarded as belonging to them. Iconography is an important aspect of genre.
Therefore, we can apply this theory to the horror genre, as we expect to see certain elements within horror texts as a result of our general expectation of a horror film.
