With the possible exception of the wildest, most out-there art pieces, all filmmaking is drama. We tell stories about characters who work toward goals and that effort leads to conflict that must be resolved. Funny or sad, cerebral or action-packed, light-hearted or sober, the story is dramatic.
Genre is how we choose to relate that drama. It is the flavour that helps set the tone and offers audiences a familiar landscape that you, the screenwriter and filmmaker, can use to your advantage.
Streamline your screenwriting
Although a screenwriter is still responsible for generating interesting characters and testing those characters through actions, reactions and consequences, genre can simplify that process by offering a writer well established tropes and motifs to fall back on. Even the most modern Western (e.g., Brokeback Mountain) involves sweeping vistas over which characters deal with tough choices while on horseback. What is Game of Thrones without its dragons or The Nice Guys without its drunken gumshoe?
But more than this, genre also offers standard set pieces, scenes and scenarios common to all films of this genre, through which a writer can run their characters. Rare is the action film without some form of chase scene or the rom-com without a meet-cute. And the best part is, you don’t have to explain any of this to your audience as they have spent a lifetime watching films within each genre. They expect much of what you throw at them, and those expectations offer you an opportunity.
Subvert expectations
As soon as your audience develops expectations of what comes next, it is almost mandatory that a screenwriter turn those expectations against the audience. When the audience thinks you’re going to zig, you zag. The minute we get used to Will Smith being chased by monsters in I Am Legend, the writer makes us question who the monster is in this film. What happens when the Master of the Dark Arts goes from being the protagonist’s greatest nemesis to his greatest ally?
By subverting expectations—up is now down, left is now Montana—the audience is left reeling and you force them to re-evaluate what they thought the knew. What seemed like a quirky comedy about a nice-guy Ryan Reynolds having conversations with his pets (The Voices) darkens severely as his cat convinces him to murder and dismember his coworkers. This pivot may, of course, annoy some but most will thank you for the surprise.
Offer new perspectives
By combining genres, you can also explore old stories or events in new ways, using the tropes and set pieces to explore new perspectives. For example, a long time ago in a Hollywood far far away, George Lucas described Star Wars as a space Western, a genre mash-up that was explored more recently with opposite emphasis in Cowboys & Aliens. Likewise, horror is often added to a coming-of-age storyline to explore what happens to adolescents as they face an uncertain world, using werewolf (Jennifer’s Body) or vampire transformation (Twilight) as a metaphor for puberty. Recently, this trend has been extended to us older folks (me) as writer/director Bao Tran used martial arts to explore coming-of-middle-age in The Paper Tigers.
Switching genres can similarly revitalize a tired franchise, letting screenwriters and filmmakers work within a known story structure, but making it all their own, or help translate a story to a new audience. Famously, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai translated to the American market as William Roberts’ Western The Magnificent Seven, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet got the musical treatment with Ernest Lehman’s West Side Story, and the Bard’s Taming of the Shrew transformed into Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith’s teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You.
And as writer/director Danis Goulet explained, genre can give storytellers a bit of distance to soften the blow of difficult subjects. This has long been the domain of science fiction and comedy, where films like Fahrenheit 451 and The Great Dictator show the world truths that might be hard to stomach.
“You can be as political as you want and because you’re in a totally fictional universe, you can say whatever you want to say,” Goulet commented in 2021, while discussing her sci-fi, post-apocalyptic film Night Raiders, which tells the story of a Cree mother fighting to protect her daughter from government agencies seeking to kidnap her. The sci-fi approach, she says, provides a bit of a buffer for a world reeling from stories of residential school horrors and cultural genocide.
Promote genre
Pitching and marketing your film is all about helping people see the story as easily as possible. Being able to definitively describe the genre of your story helps simplify that process immensely. As described above, the motifs, tropes and set pieces can quickly facilitate story set up in peoples’ minds and help establish the story’s tone.
Jonathan Levine’s horror comedy Warm Bodies is a good example. It’s Romeo & Juliet, but one’s a zombie. It’s a coming-of-rigor-mortis story. It’s a Zom-Com. The simple language and visuals immediately tell me whether this story is interesting to me.
Similarly, genre can help a screenwriter and filmmaker narrow the field of prospective producing partners. Only select production companies make horrors or comedies or Westerns…and you aren’t pitching your project to any and all production companies, right? Because these companies understand their chosen genre(s), they know their audience(s). And in some cases, those audiences can be so completely dedicated to a genre that your project doesn’t necessarily require big-name (aka expensive) talent to be successful.
As much as genre has gotten a bit of a bad rap—comedy doesn’t win awards; horror is cheap—the truth is that genre is a useful storytelling tool that can facilitate meaningful stories and offer portals to new ways of thinking that can culminate in a successful filmmaking career.
Interested in diving deeper into this topic, register for our upcoming Raindance Mastering Genre workshop series, starting September 13 at 7pm (ET). Over four consecutive Tuesdays, we will look more closely at Horror, Thriller, Sci-Fi and Comedy. Take one, some or all four, now at a reduced price with the Raindance Summer Sale. And all on Zoom!
Did You Know?
Randall C Willis is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker who teaches screenwriting at Raindance and Toronto’s George Brown College. He has also judged films, screenplays, and pitches for Raindance Live Option, Austin Film Festival, Lunenburg Doc Fest, and Landed Entertainment. Randall specializes in storytelling, helping writers of all media shape their ideas & voices, providing story analysis and coaching through his business So, What’s Your Story?, and consulting on story editing & story adaptation. He is currently developing a book—Tomorrow, I’ll be inspired. Reflections on muse-free creativity—to encourage people to live creative, passion-filled lives. His YouTube channel follows that journey.
