Speaking of Genre

21/10/2026

Miscellaneous    Download PDF  

People may no longer watch genre films with the same restrictive expectations of an earlier generation, but they might be watching them with a much greater generic awareness. While it might have been common for audiences in the forties and fifties to like a good western, or a musical, or a gangster film, or perhaps a horror, contemporary viewers are less inclined to know what they like, but more aware of what they are given.

Today we will look at five films: a western, two horrors, and two science fiction films, all of them contemporary, and in four instances, more likely than classic Hollywood films to combine generic elements. They offer a cross-pollination, one that creates freshness out of the potentially stale reiteration of narrative expectation, codified visuals and tired tropes. The great Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, proposed that genre films were a tomb — it was where films went to die. The philosopher Jacques Ranciere believed, in the context of theatre, but in a way pertinent to film also, that one can create the emancipated spectator. Tarkovsky would say that in genre the viewer becomes an incarcerated one, and this is a half-truth, but the sort of distancing devices of modern art wouldn’t be useful in trying to help us understand how genre works even at its most self-aware. If we are right that today’s viewer wants a knowing relationship with generic cinema, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to identify with character, get caught up in the story and feel catharsis, to have a sense of release and relief at the conclusion. Instead of modernist distance, the viewer may now believe they are wise to genre conventions, but still want to be wrong-footed within the genre, and for the filmmaker to combine genres in surprising ways.

We can start with Django Unchained. Is it a western or a slavery film? Though the periods crossover historically, usually the two moments are distinct in cinema. The western generally covers a mid-to-late 19th-century period; the slave film runs until the years of its abolition, with the end of the American Civil War in 1865. That they are distinguished from each other, though, is less because of historical reasons than binary purposes: the point of many a western is to show tension between whites and Native American Indians, not the liberation of black people. Though there have been a few westerns that focused upon blacks (Duel at Dueblo) or showed blacks in key supporting roles (Duel at Dueblo, Skin Game, Sergeant Rutledge, Unforgiven), a black person in a western can seem anomalous, rather like a western set in a snowy climate, though there have been a few of those (McCabe and Mrs Miller, for example) as well. No, the western is usually defined by dichotomies, and one of the biggest is the cowboy vs the Indian, however troublesome we may find it now.

In Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino uses Western iconography within the context of the slave film, and arrives at a genre-bending combination, allowing it to reshape the genre within contemporary concerns. The film came out in the middle of Obama’s presidency and coincided with the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. The Western was ripe for this type of cross-fertilisation, high-yielding ground for thinking the genre afresh. The revenge western was always a sub-category of the genre, but Tarantino has never been shy of exaggerating vengeance, and finds it here in a black man taking it out on those who have done more than oppress his family; they have oppressed an entire race. When we see him from a low-angled shot about to take out three evil brothers, Django is given monumental significance, and literally the whip hand, as he thinks nothing of wielding the lash on those who have been whipping his fellow blacks. In such moments Tarantino plays against the conventions of the western; at others he plays into them, and this can be especially conspicuous when a trope is a particular tic of the time: fast zoom shots or slow-motion scenes of people falling off horses; the former popular in the spaghetti western; the latter a regular feature of the revisionist western of the seventies.

In Ex Machina and Her, Alex Garland and Spike Jonze offer science fiction films that will likely appeal just as much to those who respond to film noir in the first instance, and romantic drama in the latter. In Ex Machina, a scientist creates a robot and a young programmer wins a week-long trip to spend time with Nathan and his creation. The film plays on the fall guy and the femme fatale, with the programmer coming into a new environment and is caught in a triangular situation, one he thinks he can resolve by saving the damsel in distress. He eventually finds things are more complicated than this. The film has a science fiction look within the narrative familiar to those who like thrillers with a twist. Garland emphasises glass and hush (while the film noir plays much more on light and shadow) as it pushes the enigma of the mysterious woman further into noirish specificity than Blade Runner. In Her, the problem is the loneliness of the lovelorn, with Twombly recovering from a break-up and finding no other woman who can make him forget his ex. Instead, he finds an operating system, a woman of his dreams. Yet in her virtual condition, she can belong to many others simultaneously, as it looks like he will be heartbroken all over again. This time, though, it will be by a figment of his imagination, and a system so highly developed it can trick us into thinking, emotionally, that we are interacting with a loved one. Like Ex Machina, Her is futuristic in its concept and in its design, with a pastel-coloured world full of sensitivity and warmth, but capable of acute moments of cruelty when one’s expectations or feelings aren’t met. People wear their trousers high, blazers with rolled up sleeves against soft lighting. It is a perfect world in some ways, but the limit of its optimism paradoxically rests on accepting we are imperfect people. We might be able to solve all the technological problems in the world, but we will still be left with flawed humans. When he discovers the operating system, Samantha, has many other lovers, Twombley cannot cope with the very human need for possessiveness. It leaves him distraught.  

The romantic drama can entertain the flawed, but the horror film often focuses on the damaged, and the link between the thriller and the horror movie rests on the psychology of the former, and the physiology of the latter. In other words, the thriller frequently reveals the complexity of the killer's motives, while the horror film is chiefly interested in the villain’s capacity to appear ingeniously. When it comes to explaining Michael Myers’ motivations in Halloween, the doctor says there isn’t much to say: he is pure evil.  Another way of describing him might be that he is pure startle effect: a jump-scare waiting to happen. It is also why the horror film is often drawn to the monster as a physiological force: the werewolf, the zombie and the vampire all have needs more than they have reasons. A good horror may provide all the rationale it likes, but it chiefly needs to scare the hell out of the audience. Nobody cares what the shark in Jaws is thinking.

Yet horror has often been psychological, even sociological, and the latter is pertinent to both Get Out and The Conjuring. Get Out can seem like a horrifying version of a ‘60s film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, and not surprisingly, director Jordan Peele has invoked the earlier work when saying that the “film was so effective in its discussion with race because it started with a situation that was universal. Take the race out of it, everybody can relate to the fear of meeting your potential in-laws for the first time.” (Screenwriting from Iowa) But while the earlier film constantly shows the horror on people’s faces when they see a black man with a white woman, Get Out exacerbates it and inverts it. Horror has always shown the importance of the reaction shot, but in Get Out it isn’t the horror on white faces that matters, but the eventual horror on central character Chris’s visage as he realises he is soon to be a victim of wealthy white people’s organ trafficking demands. The reaction shot is his, the now famous image of Daniel Kaluuya looking petrified, strapped to a chair. While the earlier film is chiefly concerned with the sociological and the psychological as it moves to a happy, race-resolved ending, Get Out, of course, has its duty to explore the horror. We are promptly no longer concerned with the relationship with his white girlfriend, when Chris sees he is far from the first black boyfriend she claims he is, only with how the heck Chris will get out of the situation. Peele may use Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? as a useful premise, but he promptly drops the sociology of romance for the physiology of terror in a fine blend of genre-mixing.

Finally, The Conjuring; perhaps the most predictable of our choices because it genre-bends the least and is the most indebted to earlier examples, without transformation. It offers aspects of The Exorcist and even more The Amityville Horror, which has itself been remade, while there have been sequels to The Conjuring too.  Simply aping elements of these 70s movies, which is when The Conjuring is set, the film possesses none of the irony or self-reflexivity Tarantino practices when approaching the western genre, as the slow zooms here and the prowling steadicam call to mind The Exorcist and Halloween. But they end up feeling like an obvious echo rather than an uncanny effect. What the film explores is the sociological as real estate, with the family in need of a roomy home for their five daughters and a dog, and go upscale, yet downgrade, by taking a rundown pile in Harrisville, Rhode Island. Places this spooky don’t come cheap, and more recently the house the film was based on went for “$1.525 million.” (Forbes) Genre clearly isn’t going away if a standard example like The Conjuring can conjure up over $300m worldwide and a prompt sequel, but better the films that think genre anew than those arriving at dead-centre predictability. The Conjuring does little with its sociological dimension, while Get Out does much with its social concerns. It is by absorbing aspects of the sociological, the psychological, the historical and yes, sometimes simply the further reaches of the physiological, that genre can remain pertinent, even if the obvious can still make a fortune. Otherwise, we might believe the spectator is too easily incarcerated, and genre can indeed feel like a tomb.    

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Speaking of Genre

People may no longer watch genre films with the same restrictive expectations of an earlier generation, but they might be watching them with a much greater generic awareness. While it might have been common for audiences in the forties and fifties to like a good western, or a musical, or a gangster film, or perhaps a horror, contemporary viewers are less inclined to know what they like, but more aware of what they are given.

Today we will look at five films: a western, two horrors, and two science fiction films, all of them contemporary, and in four instances, more likely than classic Hollywood films to combine generic elements. They offer a cross-pollination, one that creates freshness out of the potentially stale reiteration of narrative expectation, codified visuals and tired tropes. The great Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, proposed that genre films were a tomb — it was where films went to die. The philosopher Jacques Ranciere believed, in the context of theatre, but in a way pertinent to film also, that one can create the emancipated spectator. Tarkovsky would say that in genre the viewer becomes an incarcerated one, and this is a half-truth, but the sort of distancing devices of modern art wouldn’t be useful in trying to help us understand how genre works even at its most self-aware. If we are right that today’s viewer wants a knowing relationship with generic cinema, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to identify with character, get caught up in the story and feel catharsis, to have a sense of release and relief at the conclusion. Instead of modernist distance, the viewer may now believe they are wise to genre conventions, but still want to be wrong-footed within the genre, and for the filmmaker to combine genres in surprising ways.

We can start with Django Unchained. Is it a western or a slavery film? Though the periods crossover historically, usually the two moments are distinct in cinema. The western generally covers a mid-to-late 19th-century period; the slave film runs until the years of its abolition, with the end of the American Civil War in 1865. That they are distinguished from each other, though, is less because of historical reasons than binary purposes: the point of many a western is to show tension between whites and Native American Indians, not the liberation of black people. Though there have been a few westerns that focused upon blacks (Duel at Dueblo) or showed blacks in key supporting roles (Duel at Dueblo, Skin Game, Sergeant Rutledge, Unforgiven), a black person in a western can seem anomalous, rather like a western set in a snowy climate, though there have been a few of those (McCabe and Mrs Miller, for example) as well. No, the western is usually defined by dichotomies, and one of the biggest is the cowboy vs the Indian, however troublesome we may find it now.

In Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino uses Western iconography within the context of the slave film, and arrives at a genre-bending combination, allowing it to reshape the genre within contemporary concerns. The film came out in the middle of Obama’s presidency and coincided with the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. The Western was ripe for this type of cross-fertilisation, high-yielding ground for thinking the genre afresh. The revenge western was always a sub-category of the genre, but Tarantino has never been shy of exaggerating vengeance, and finds it here in a black man taking it out on those who have done more than oppress his family; they have oppressed an entire race. When we see him from a low-angled shot about to take out three evil brothers, Django is given monumental significance, and literally the whip hand, as he thinks nothing of wielding the lash on those who have been whipping his fellow blacks. In such moments Tarantino plays against the conventions of the western; at others he plays into them, and this can be especially conspicuous when a trope is a particular tic of the time: fast zoom shots or slow-motion scenes of people falling off horses; the former popular in the spaghetti western; the latter a regular feature of the revisionist western of the seventies.

In Ex Machina and Her, Alex Garland and Spike Jonze offer science fiction films that will likely appeal just as much to those who respond to film noir in the first instance, and romantic drama in the latter. In Ex Machina, a scientist creates a robot and a young programmer wins a week-long trip to spend time with Nathan and his creation. The film plays on the fall guy and the femme fatale, with the programmer coming into a new environment and is caught in a triangular situation, one he thinks he can resolve by saving the damsel in distress. He eventually finds things are more complicated than this. The film has a science fiction look within the narrative familiar to those who like thrillers with a twist. Garland emphasises glass and hush (while the film noir plays much more on light and shadow) as it pushes the enigma of the mysterious woman further into noirish specificity than Blade Runner. In Her, the problem is the loneliness of the lovelorn, with Twombly recovering from a break-up and finding no other woman who can make him forget his ex. Instead, he finds an operating system, a woman of his dreams. Yet in her virtual condition, she can belong to many others simultaneously, as it looks like he will be heartbroken all over again. This time, though, it will be by a figment of his imagination, and a system so highly developed it can trick us into thinking, emotionally, that we are interacting with a loved one. Like Ex Machina, Her is futuristic in its concept and in its design, with a pastel-coloured world full of sensitivity and warmth, but capable of acute moments of cruelty when one’s expectations or feelings aren’t met. People wear their trousers high, blazers with rolled up sleeves against soft lighting. It is a perfect world in some ways, but the limit of its optimism paradoxically rests on accepting we are imperfect people. We might be able to solve all the technological problems in the world, but we will still be left with flawed humans. When he discovers the operating system, Samantha, has many other lovers, Twombley cannot cope with the very human need for possessiveness. It leaves him distraught.  

The romantic drama can entertain the flawed, but the horror film often focuses on the damaged, and the link between the thriller and the horror movie rests on the psychology of the former, and the physiology of the latter. In other words, the thriller frequently reveals the complexity of the killer's motives, while the horror film is chiefly interested in the villain’s capacity to appear ingeniously. When it comes to explaining Michael Myers’ motivations in Halloween, the doctor says there isn’t much to say: he is pure evil.  Another way of describing him might be that he is pure startle effect: a jump-scare waiting to happen. It is also why the horror film is often drawn to the monster as a physiological force: the werewolf, the zombie and the vampire all have needs more than they have reasons. A good horror may provide all the rationale it likes, but it chiefly needs to scare the hell out of the audience. Nobody cares what the shark in Jaws is thinking.

Yet horror has often been psychological, even sociological, and the latter is pertinent to both Get Out and The Conjuring. Get Out can seem like a horrifying version of a ‘60s film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, and not surprisingly, director Jordan Peele has invoked the earlier work when saying that the “film was so effective in its discussion with race because it started with a situation that was universal. Take the race out of it, everybody can relate to the fear of meeting your potential in-laws for the first time.” (Screenwriting from Iowa) But while the earlier film constantly shows the horror on people’s faces when they see a black man with a white woman, Get Out exacerbates it and inverts it. Horror has always shown the importance of the reaction shot, but in Get Out it isn’t the horror on white faces that matters, but the eventual horror on central character Chris’s visage as he realises he is soon to be a victim of wealthy white people’s organ trafficking demands. The reaction shot is his, the now famous image of Daniel Kaluuya looking petrified, strapped to a chair. While the earlier film is chiefly concerned with the sociological and the psychological as it moves to a happy, race-resolved ending, Get Out, of course, has its duty to explore the horror. We are promptly no longer concerned with the relationship with his white girlfriend, when Chris sees he is far from the first black boyfriend she claims he is, only with how the heck Chris will get out of the situation. Peele may use Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? as a useful premise, but he promptly drops the sociology of romance for the physiology of terror in a fine blend of genre-mixing.

Finally, The Conjuring; perhaps the most predictable of our choices because it genre-bends the least and is the most indebted to earlier examples, without transformation. It offers aspects of The Exorcist and even more The Amityville Horror, which has itself been remade, while there have been sequels to The Conjuring too.  Simply aping elements of these 70s movies, which is when The Conjuring is set, the film possesses none of the irony or self-reflexivity Tarantino practices when approaching the western genre, as the slow zooms here and the prowling steadicam call to mind The Exorcist and Halloween. But they end up feeling like an obvious echo rather than an uncanny effect. What the film explores is the sociological as real estate, with the family in need of a roomy home for their five daughters and a dog, and go upscale, yet downgrade, by taking a rundown pile in Harrisville, Rhode Island. Places this spooky don’t come cheap, and more recently the house the film was based on went for “$1.525 million.” (Forbes) Genre clearly isn’t going away if a standard example like The Conjuring can conjure up over $300m worldwide and a prompt sequel, but better the films that think genre anew than those arriving at dead-centre predictability. The Conjuring does little with its sociological dimension, while Get Out does much with its social concerns. It is by absorbing aspects of the sociological, the psychological, the historical and yes, sometimes simply the further reaches of the physiological, that genre can remain pertinent, even if the obvious can still make a fortune. Otherwise, we might believe the spectator is too easily incarcerated, and genre can indeed feel like a tomb.    


© Tony McKibbin