The Ghosts of Grief: An Exploration of Gothic Influence in 2010s Horror Cinema

Genre Theory

Genre Study, as an approach to analyzing and understanding film, is a theory that looks at particular conventions and recurring elements present in a movie. Specifically, when analyzing a film using Genre Study, we look at the conventions filmmakers are working with. Conventions shape an audience’s “expectations about what [they]’re likely to see and hear” (Bordwell et. al 331). Story and style conventions usually center on narrative plots and themes. These plots and their elements become staples that are adapted and retold within the genre. Additionally, genres can be defined through iconography. Rather than focus on the story, iconography is the recurrence of visual symbols and images in a genre (Bordwell et. al 331-333). Scholars commonly look at genres using three main approaches: Genre as Cultural Myth, Genre as Cultural Memories, and Genre as Rituals (Friedman et al. 8-16). Genre as Cultural Myth and Genre as Cultural Memories use cultural context as the basis for their approach. As the names imply, Cultural Myth is concerned with the social narrative that has been constructed in a film to depict a fictional reality of the past while Cultural Memories transform historical moments, stories, and events into staple plots of the given genre. Friedman and his colleagues differentiate the approaches by stating “though the two are intimately entwined, films that function as memories usually style themselves as realistic though often wrapped in fictional disguises, while myths partake of broader archetypes and narratives less overtly tied to everyday events” (14). Genres as Rituals is an approach concerned with the repetition of narratives and iconography. As stories are told over and over again they begin to shape the genre. Intertextuality plays a major role in this form of analysis as films comment on one another by repeating elements from their predecessors (Friedman et al. 16-17). These three approaches are not mutually exclusive and can be applied to any genre. For the purpose of my research, I will be using Genre Study to look at the conventions of story, style and genre iconography in the gothic-horror film subgenre. I will apply the three approaches of Genre: Cultural Myth, Genre as Cultural Memories, and Genre as Rituals, in order to analyze the gothic-horror films: The Babadook (2014), Crimson Peak (2015), and The Invitation (2015). 

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