Why do genres change over time?

Generic texts do not have a set of fixed and unchanging characteristics but, like any other texts, they reflect the changing times and societies in which they are produced as well as changes in media institutions, such as the film industry, themselves.

When accounting for why and in what ways genres change over time you need to consider the changing popularity of particular genres at particular times, the changing content of genre texts and also changes in the treatment of the genre.

Below is a list of possible reasons why genres might change over time.

Changes in Target Audience

Media institutions and producers need to have a clear idea about the audience a film is likely to attract before production begins and the age, gender and social class of the target audience is likely to influence the way a film is made from choices about who will appear in it to the kinds of special effects used. Of course, the audience who actually consumes a film may be very different from the audience intended and different texts from the same genre may appeal to different audiences.

It is often argued that target audiences for films have become younger over the years. This is known as the “juvenilisation” of cinema and may be why horror films are now usually aimed at a mainly teenage audience. Some recent research also suggests that when heterosexual couples go to the cinema it is likely to be the woman who decides what film to see while the man pays and, if this is the case, it may influence not only where and how films are marketed but also the kinds of films which are produced and how they are made.

Changes in Audience Expectations

Contemporary audiences are much more sophisticated viewers than those who saw the first moving pictures or television programmes and an audience reading a text from an established genre is likely to be familiar with the codes and conventions of that genre from reading similar texts. So, if you read a romance novel where the leading lady doesn't end up with her man you'd certainly be surprised and possibly feel cheated. If, while watching a horror film, you see a woman who is alone in a house at night, opening a door, against a background of scary, tense music your heart rate might increase and you’d prepare yourself for the woman to reveal something, or someone, pretty nasty. Your familiarity with these codes and conventions - the character, the setting, the music - from watching similar horror films or television programmes, all raise your expectations, even if there is nothing on the other side of the door (in which case of course, you breathe a sigh of relief only for the killer to jump up from the window!).

Perhaps surprisingly, much of the enjoyment that comes from watching, or reading, generic texts is derived precisely from knowing what to expect from them. Filmmakers can manipulate our emotions by meeting or cheating the expectations we have of a text based on our readings of similar films. The popularity of certain kinds of texts proves that for many audiences familiarity breeds contentment rather than contempt!

Having said this, films need to strike the right balance of repeating certain codes and conventions while adding something new - a contemporary setting, a final ‘twist’, a moment where a protagonist behaves unexpectedly or perhaps even a self-conscious parody of existing codes and conventions - in order to keep the genre fresh and prevent us from getting bored. These novelties may be rejected or may be absorbed into the genre so that they become conventional in future texts. As an example, Scream, one of the first horror films to self-consciously parody the conventions of the genre, was considered to be groundbreaking when it was released in 1998 but, only two years later, after a spate of similarly inter-textual and self-reflexive films. Scary Movie, a parody of these parodies, was released in 2000. In order to enjoy Scary Movie (I, II, etc.) audiences would need to be familiar not only with the conventions of horror but also with films that parody them, showing just how quickly genres change and audiences become familiar with these changes.