film genres

There are many different genre's in film. Here are a few in my spider diagram. I am going to be looking at the theory about genres by Rick Altman. He suggested that in order to fully understand the concept of a genre you need to take a 3 point approach.

1) Semantic - The semantic approach is looking at the things that make up a genre. Examples of these are you're typical costumes props and settings. In my genre of horror you would expect the setting to be dark and unnerving, the costumes to have masks, blood, knifes, all in black, the settings would be places like haunted houses, the woods etc.


2) Syntactic - This approach is the deeper structure of the genre which would be things like the themes, narrative and characters relationships. For example in my genre of horror the themes would be death, revenge, isolation. The conventional narrative would be something like a psycho killer is out to stalk or kill an innocent person. The character relationship in my film isn't really linked however could be something like the protagonist had a bad past with the killer.

3) Pragmatic - Rick Altman realised that the genre of media text can be interpreted differently by different members of the audience. This means when developing your genre you need to keep in mind that the audience will not always understand the genre as other members of the audience might. Everyone interprets a genre differently and that's the fascinating thing about film and can work and be amazing or wont work and wont be a success.