Genre

What is genre? 

Genre is a way of categorizing a media product based on its conventions. It is used by institutions to help identify their audience, the audience will have a pre-judgment of a film based off of its genre, therefore institutions use this to their advantage when it comes to marketing. There are two key parts within genre, sub-genre, and hybrid-genre. Sub-genre is a genre within a genre, whereby the main genre category is so broad that there are subsections within it, for example, gothic horror, it's a specific genre within the broad category of the genre. A hybrid genre is where two or more main genres are combined, for example, a romantic comedy. Hybrid genres are far less predictable than normal genres as there's no stereotypical ending as there's no one clear genre.

There are many classic associations with the genre, such as expecting to see Kevin Hart playing a comedic character in a comedy- if the audience were to see Kevin Hart in a period-drama their initial reaction would be that there's going to be a flare of humor, so from a casting perspective this certainly wouldn't work due to the actors' comedic connotations. Another example would be in horror movies, the audience generally expects to see the archetypical 'ditsy blonde' get killed within the opening scene, this is because of stereotypes linked with thecharacter type that is part of conventions.