Genre

Before deciding what our genre was going to be, we wanted to do some research on what genre actually is and how other people view it.
Genre comes from a french word that means 'type' or 'kind'. It demonstrates a way of putting different media texts into categories that share of the same qualities. There are many different types of Genre's for example:

• Romcom
• Science Fiction
• Musicals
• Western
• Thriller
• Horror
• Comedy
• Animation
• Action
• Mystery

Whilst researching the meaning of genre, we also looked at what other people thought about what a genre is and why it is so important. I found that Andrew Tudor, a professor in New York, believes that genre is 'what we collectively believe it to be' and 'a genre defines a moral and social world.' However Linda Williams, a film scholar, argues that 'horror, melodrama and pornography all fall into the category of "body genres", since they are each designed to elicit spine-chilling, white-knuckled, eye-bulging terror; melodramas are designed to make the viewers cry after seeing the misfortunes of the onscreen characters; and pornography is designed to elicit sexual arousal. And finally, Janet Staiger,  historian of American film and television, feels that 'Hollywood films are not pure genres, because most Hollywood movies blend the love-oriented plot of the romance genre with other genres. I think these are all relevant to the way we want to make our film. We want to make sure that we keep some of the typical conventions of horror films, but we didn't want our film to fall into any other categories taking away the emphasis on the horror.

Genre is very important to the audience, as it helps them to determine what type of film it is and whether they will be interested in seeing it or not. They can also be sure of what they will see in this particular genre, for example a person is less likely to see a graphic horro scene in a romance film. Not only is genre important to the audience but it is very important for the producers because they can determine how big their target audience is going to be by seeing how popular the genre already is. The more typical the genre is, the more people are likely to want to see their film.


We found it quite easy to decide what our genre would be because of the surrounding area of where we live we thought that it would be suitable for a horror film. Within a horror, there are many typical aspects that the audience expect to see and we wanted to make sure that we not only met a few of them, but challenged them as well to make sure that it is not like every other horror film ever released. For example, there are always the contrasting characters, or in other words the hero and the villain. We wanted to keep this convention in our film as there wouldn't be an effective or interesting storyline without a villain and hero to draw us in. 
We also decided that the setting of our trailer would be in the forest. Although this is quite a typical setting for horror films we wanted to do it because we live in the countryside and had easy access to lots of fields and forests to make the trailer look as effective as possible.