2. WHAT IS GENRE?
• Genre is a way of putting different categories of media texts according to content and style.
Each genre has different characteristics which the audience can predict on what is going to
happen and how it is going to develop. E.g. in rom-com films where the man and the woman
end up together.
• There are a variety of genres that include; horror, comedy, crime, romance, sci-fi, animation,
thriller as well as many more. These can be hybrids of genres such as rom-coms which can
have typical conventions of both genres.
• Media texts are given specific genres in order to appeal to different target audiences, for
example in horror films the audience are likely to suspect tension and drama as well as
supernatural characters. Which always end up with several deaths within the film.
3. GENRE THEORISTS
• Steve Neale states that ‘genres are instances of repetition and difference’ he adds that
‘difference is absolutely essential to the economy of genre’. John Hartley notes that ‘the
same text can belong to different genres in different countries or times’ .
4. GENRE THEORISTS LINKING TO THE
HORROR GENRE
• Stephen Prince (a theorist in the horror genre) states that ‘like other genre movies, any
given horror film will convey synchronic association, ideological and social messages
that are a part of a certain period of historical moment, much like they can do in gangster
films. But unlike this genre, horror also goes deeper, to explore more fundamental
questions about the nature of human existence, and other questions that, in some
profound ways, go beyond culture and society as these are organised in any given form
or period.
• From this, we understand that Prince feels that the horror genre is an elite genre within
the field of film, as it is the most realistic, and some concepts and ideas placed into films
in the genre are relative to ‘real life’.
