Genre Exploration Task

Genre- Comedy• The purpose of Comedy is to amuse or make the audience laugh.• The general conventions of the Comedy Genre are there is always a main character

that something unfortunate happens to.• The comedy genre was established 1900’s-1920’s. The genre emerged because

silent films were ideal around the nineteenth century. Slapstick violence was one of the earliest forms of Comedy as it revolved around a practical joke or physical ‘mishap’.

An example of classical film to represent the genre around the 19th century.

Subgenres- Action Comedy• Action Comedy; this sub-genre combines action with humour. Action-Comedy

relies on the characters to bring out the humour, while the scenes containing action tend to be less intense than the conventional action movie.

-Examples of Action Comedy:

These type of films are often buddy films, with mismatched partners, which makes mishaps & things which happen in the movie, comical.

Subgenres- Comedy Horror• Comedy horror is a type of horror film. The typically dark themes within the film

are combined with humorous tones. These films use goofy horror clichés.• Horror-Comedy combines comedy with traditional horror movie themes and

characters. They can cross over into the Black Comedy sub-genre. Horror-Comedy films aim to scare the audience, but also provide comical things that allow the audience to laugh at their fear.

-Examples of Comedy Horror; Scream, Young Frankenstein, Little Shop of Horrors, Haunted Mansion and Scary Movie. Another style of comedy horror can also rely on over the top violence and gore such as in Dead Alive (1992), Evil Dead (1981), and Club Dread - such films are sometimes known as splatstick.

Subgenres- Fantasy Comedy• Fantasy comedy films are types of films that uses magic, supernatural and

or mythological figures for comical purposes. Most fantasy comedy includes an element of parody, or satire, changing the fantasy conventions, such as the hero becoming a cowardly fool, the princess being a ‘klutz’.

Subgenres- Black Comedy• Much like comedy-horror, black comedy, or dark comedy, is a type of comedy

film that often uses cruelty as the source of humour. Most black comedies involve crime or other intense moments like average school/workplace bullying.

• Its a sub-genre of both Comedy and Satire. They often explore concepts and topics that are considered taboo. Black Comedy takes topics and situations that are commonly held as serious and explores them in a comical way. Because of this approach, Black Comedies often cause the audience to laugh and feel uncomfortable at the same time.

-Examples of Black Comedy films are; Dr. Strangelove, Ruthless people, and The Cable Guy .

Subgenres- Sci-fi Comedy• Sci-fi comedy films, like most hybrid genre of comedy use the elements of

science fiction films to over the top extremes and exaggerated science fiction stereotypical characters.

• Comic science fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that exploits the genre's conventions for comic effect. Comic science fiction often mocks or satirizes standard SF conventions like alien invasion of Earth, interstellar travel, or futuristic technology.

-Examples of Sci-Fi Comedy; Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Men in Black, Spaceballs.

Subgenres- Romantic Comedy• Romantic-Comedy is a genre that attempts to catch the viewer’s heart with the

combination of love and humour. This sub-genre is light-hearted and usually places the two protagonists in humorous situation. Romantic-Comedy film revolves around a romantic ideal, such as true love. In the end, the ideal triumphs over the situation or obstacle, thus creating a happy ending.

-Examples of Romantic Comedy; When harry met Sally,

Hybrids- Disaster Films• Disaster films, a sub-genre of action films, hit their peak in the decade of the 1970s.

Big-budget disaster films provided all-star casts and interlocking, Grand Hotel-type stories, with suspenseful action and impending crises (man-made or natural) in locales such as aboard imperilled airliners, trains, dirigibles, sinking or wrecked ocean-liners, or in towering burning skyscrapers, crowded stadiums or earthquake zones. Often noted for their visual and special effects, but not their acting performances.

• The purpose of this Hybrid is to

Hybrids- Film Noir• Film noir (meaning 'black film') is a distinct branch of the crime/gangster sagas from

the 1930s. Strictly speaking, film noir is not a genre, but rather the mood, style or tone of various American films that evolved in the 1940s, and lasted in a classic period until about 1960. However, film noir has not been exclusively confined to this era, and has re-occurred in cyclical form in other years in various neo-noirs. Noirs are usually black and white films with primary moods of melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt and paranoia. And they often feature a cynical, loner hero (anti-hero) and femme fatale, in a seedy big city.

• The purpose of this Hybrid is to allow the viewer to be immersed in the storyline, by the use of drama and likeable storylines. Fear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia . These are all to create an order of suspense.

• Some examples of Film Noir are films such as; Angels With Dirty faces.

Hybrids- Melodramas• Melodramas are a sub-type of drama films, characterized by a plot to appeal to the

emotions of the audience. Often, film studies criticism used the term 'melodrama' pejoratively to connote an unrealistic, pathos-filled tales of romance or domestic situations with stereotypical characters that would directly appeal to feminine audiences ("weepies" or "woman's films").

• Melodrama was created because the Church wanted theatre to reflect how we should act and behave. The main story of Melodrama usually involves a heroine getting kidnapped by an evil villain and the hero coming along to save the girl and show that 'good always triumph's over evil' and that 'all evil people will pay in the end‘

• An example of a melodrama is ‘The perils of Pauline.’