Genre Essay and Plan

Abercrombie - Boundaries between genres are shifting and becoming more permeable
Steve Neale - Genres are systems not processes - they are dynamic and evolve over time
Mittell - Industries use genre to sell products to audience. Genre allows audiences to make choices

Hybrid genre - more than 1 genre

To what extent does your thriller conform to traditional structures of genre?

Our thriller very strongly follows the traditional structure of genre. Our genre was thriller and to keep to this genre we did not include anything else which could relate to other genres. Our thriller conforms to the genre theories and is a traditional thriller in relation to genre.

In our thriller we only used features in the film which were suitable for thriller, these things are common and expected in a thriller. This relates to Jason Mittell's theory that the genre is what sells to the audience, therefore we have used soundtrack, characters, locations, props etc. which the audience of a thriller will like. Using stereotypical features of a thriller in our film will attract our particular target audience because from looking at previous films we know  that this is what they like. Using this idea also helped us towards just keeping to one genre. This was because of the fear that by including other features which are common in other genres may put our particular target audience off of our thriller. 

Rick Altman has the theory that genres offer some sort of pleasure to the audience, which would be difficult for us to do if we were using more than one genre. As our film is a thriller it offers intellectual puzzles to the audience, pleasuring them as they are trying to figure out the film and therefore become more involved. We did this by not making it clear what was in the envelope and also who the girl or the thugs were. Doing this makes the audience think about the mysteries and makes them more into the film as they want to see what happens at the end. We followed the traditional structure of genre to do this because it may have been very difficult to include this pleasure through multiple genres. This may have been difficult because we would not only have to think of how to pleasure the audience through thriller but we would also have to think of it through other genres, which would still pleasure them. 

Chandler's theory is that a genre must have a purpose. Our film has a purpose, however this is imposed through our genre of thriller. The purpose of our plot is to make the audience feel suspense and be on the edge of their seat. We wanted them to wonder what will happen next and also feel some feeling towards characters in the thriller. If we included another genre in our film it may have been harder to 'thrill' the audience as they could be focused on other aspects of the film. Therefore we have conformed to the traditional structure of genre through this too as I believe it will have a better outcome on fulfilling the purpose of our plot. 

Buckingham has the theory that you have to create the genre in your film and you are not just given it. This is what we have done to obtain the idea of the thriller genre. We have used multiple features in our thriller such as soundtrack and camera angles to create the tension which should be expected in a thriller. Doing this keeps to the traditional structure of genre because to have a hybrid of genres you would need to work even harder to include everything which will show the variation of genres. 

Abercrombie has a theory against the idea of traditional structure as he thinks that genre is steadily dismantling. This means that genres are not the same anymore and more and more films are using a hybrid of genres. Our film does not do this as we stay to one genre and are consistent in using this. We only include MES, sound, camera and editing work which represent the genre of thriller. We did this to make it clear that our film is a thriller genre. If we was to include other features to represent another genre it might make it confusing as to what genre we are aiming for our film to be. Therefore, although Abercrombie suggests the films are falling away from the traditional structure of genre and that genre is 'dismantling', our film goes against this and confides to traditionalism. 

In conclusion, our thriller does conform to the traditional structure of genre and in no way does it go against it. We can see that it conforms because we have clearly and strongly kept to the genre of thriller and have no recollection of any other genre.