Genre research

I had a rough idea in my  mind about the movie, yet I wasn't  sure what genre it specifically fit. According to Steve Neale's genre theory narrative similarities are one of the key stones of how to group media into genre categories, and so starting with that idea, I started researching genres that have similarities to our film. The thing is genre similarities doesn't mean that it's that genre. There need to be multiple key similarities for it. For example, our character transforms into an animal but it doesn't make it a fantasy as there is no magic or creatures. It's all about figuring out the most similarities.

When talking to my group members they said that the two genres that fit the best were thriller and horror. Those two genres have always been unclear to me in their similarities so the first thing to do was to find out the differences between thriller and horror

When Evil Lurks,2023

Horror

Horror is an old genre that is all about scaring and shocking the audience. Through a lot of ways and that's how subgenres of horror happen like supernatural horror and psychological horror to name a few. They have different changes to what the audience is supposed to be scared about but the audience always must be scared. Horror uses timing, editing, sound and cinematography to bring out reactions of tension and dread to the viewers.

Thriller

Parasite,2019

Compared to horror, thrillers are newer. Thrillers are a mix of a lot of genres, mostly horror, action and crime. The point of the genre is to cause uncertainty and anticipation in its audiences. Thrillers can be slasher movies or superheroes. The conventions of thrillers are suspense, tense music, uncomfortable camera angles and themes like crime, psychological, science and action.

So, which one is it?

An important thing that to keep in mind when to think about genre is why is the film created, each genre has an intended purpose like slice of life is to make the audience. Our film was created to show how bad obsession can be, how detrimental it can become. To show that to the audience there must be awkward long shots, tense full music, and keep the audience uncertain. With those conventions written out the best fit would be a thriller. But there are a lot of types of thrillers.

Some subgenres of thriller are action thrillers, but the film I am making doesn't have any fighting scenes, crime thriller but our character isn't trying to steal anything, horror thriller, but the movie isn't supposed to bring terror to the audience. The best match is psychological thriller as our movie is about an unstable character that keeps the audience guessing.

Think of the bigger picture

Genre is a tricky thing, even following Neale theory it's a difficult topic to divide, there are so many sub genres, and sub genres of sub genres. It's easy to get carried away and go insane searching for all forms of genres to see which one matches best. Paying attention to those small details can be detrimental to the bigger pitches. Sometimes it's best to accept something and keep moving. .I took so long finding the perfect because so many fit into our film. Getting lost in endless circles of all types of genres trying to get the perfect one is not worth it.