Genres

Horror is the genre designed to frighten — through threat, the uncanny and the grotesque — and it relies on darkness, negative space, sound and withheld information as much as on monsters.

A slasher is a horror subgenre in which a masked or unstoppable killer stalks and murders a group of young people one by one until a 'final girl' confronts him — Black Christmas, Halloween, Scream.

The spaghetti western is the 1960s–70s wave of Italian-made westerns, led by Sergio Leone: amoral gunslingers, operatic violence, Ennio Morricone scores and a signature cut from sweeping wides to extreme close-ups of eyes.

A dystopian film imagines an oppressive future society — totalitarian, polluted or collapsed — and makes its world visible through brutalist architecture, surveillance, rationed color and crowds in uniform (Metropolis, Brazil, Children of Men).

Art house film is personal, formally adventurous cinema made for artistic expression over mass appeal — and the specialized theaters that screen it; the tradition runs from Fellini's 8½ to Wong Kar-wai and Haneke.

A biopic is a fiction film that dramatizes the life of a real person — either the whole life or one decisive episode — compressing and inventing scenes to shape facts into a story.

Black comedy finds laughs in subjects normally treated as taboo or tragic — death, violence, illness, war — and makes the audience uneasy about what it is laughing at.

A buddy cop film pairs two mismatched partners — by temperament, age, race or method — who must solve a case together; the friction between them drives the comedy and the action (48 Hrs., Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour).

Comedy is the genre built to make the audience laugh — through character, situation, wordplay or physical gags — and it usually bends toward a happy or reconciling ending.

A coming-of-age film follows a young protagonist across the threshold into adulthood — first love, loss, rebellion, a moral choice — and measures the story by how the hero sees the world differently at the end.

Drama is the broad genre of serious stories about realistic characters in emotional or moral conflict, where the stakes are internal and relationships rather than spectacle.

Live action means footage of real actors and physical sets or locations captured by a camera, as opposed to animation — even when it is heavily extended with visual effects.

Melodrama heightens emotion above realism: clear-cut virtue and villainy, coincidences, big musical cues and expressive color push the audience toward tears — Douglas Sirk's 1950s films are the reference point.

A mockumentary is fiction staged in documentary form — talking-head interviews, handheld camera, captions, 'caught' moments — usually for comedy, as in This Is Spinal Tap or Borat.

A parody imitates the style, clichés and famous scenes of a specific work or genre and exaggerates them for comic effect — Airplane!, Young Frankenstein, Galaxy Quest.

Romance tropes are the recurring situations of love stories — meet-cute, enemies to lovers, fake relationship, love triangle, the airport dash — that audiences recognize and enjoy seeing replayed.

Satire uses exaggeration, irony and ridicule to attack real institutions, politics or social behavior — the laugh carries a critique, as in Dr. Strangelove or Network.

Slapstick is physical comedy of exaggerated violence without real harm — pratfalls, chases, pies in the face — perfected in silent films by Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd.

Grindhouse refers to run-down urban theaters of the 1960s–70s that ran cheap exploitation films non-stop, and to those films themselves — later homaged by Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007).

Blaxploitation is a wave of early-1970s American exploitation films made for Black audiences, with Black heroes, urban settings, funk and soul scores — Shaft and Super Fly are its emblems.

A character study is a film driven by the inner life of one person rather than by plot: events matter only as far as they reveal who the character is and how they change or fail to change.

Chick flick is an informal, often dismissive label for films marketed mainly to women — usually romantic comedies and dramas about love, friendship and female self-discovery.

Genre conventions are the recurring settings, characters, plot moves, images and sounds an audience expects from a genre; filmmakers follow, bend or break them to meet or subvert those expectations.

A hybrid genre film fuses the conventions of two or more genres — sci-fi horror, western musical, romantic comedy-thriller — so that each genre's expectations reshape the other's.

Screenlife is a format where the whole story unfolds on a computer or phone screen — video calls, chats, browser tabs and cursor moves become the shots and the editing (Unfriended, Searching, Host).

Tragicomedy blends tragic and comic modes in one story, so that laughter and grief sit side by side and color each other — Life Is Beautiful is a classic film example.

A werewolf film is a horror subgenre built around a human who turns into a wolf-like beast — the transformation scene, the full moon and the curse stand in for loss of control and a divided self (The Wolf Man, An American Werewolf in London).

Magical realism presents impossible events inside an otherwise ordinary, realistic world and treats them matter-of-factly — no one in the story finds the magic strange (Like Water for Chocolate).