Genre Hybrids
Film genres need to be fluid, these need to consists of shifting evolving sets of paradigms. If this weren’t the case then film would be making the same movies part of the same genre groups and the stories wouldn’t be changing and it’d become very bland. That’s why over the centuries there has been the creation of “Sub Genres”. These sub genres are often created by a mash up of putting things together and putting conflicting genres that may not fit with each other. An example of some of the hybrid mixes we see with the horror genre are as follows:
- Horror Romance
- Horror War
- Horror Historical Drama
- Horror RomCom
Here are some mashups in the comedy genre:
- Black-Comedy
- Horror-Comedy
- Drama-comedy
- Parody/Spoof
- Romantic-Comedy
Subgenres
Since there is only a specific amount of genres and that you can only make a specific amount of entertaining movies in a specific genre that keeps the audience entertained before becoming bored came the creation of sub genres, which is more genres that are under one specific main genre. Sub genres can be created in response to movies that are able to push genre paradigms in a successful way or external socio historic factors, and cross traditional genre boundaries.
Some examples of sub genres that exist within some main genres are:
- Sci-Fi SUB:
- Alien Invasion
- Alternate History (SF)
- Alternate/Parallel Universe
- Apocalyptic/Post-Apocalyptic
- Artificial Intelligence
- Colonization
- Cyberpunk
- Dying Earth
Sources
http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/alevel.php?pageID=filmgenre
Rafael Benavente's Blog 