The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Broadly speaking, genres are part of a system for collating and categorising films of a similar type. Films belonging to a particular genre are linked by their use of one or more conventional elements associated with that genre, also called tropes. These tropes can take a number of different forms:

• Subject matter or theme, e.g. westerns are often concerned with good vs evil
• Plot patterns, e.g. romantic comedies often contain a “meet cute”, police thrillers often end with a standoff or shootout
• Manner of presentation, e.g. detective films are often structured around the process of investigation
• Emotional effect, e.g. comedies attempt to elicit humour, horror films attempt to shock or frighten the audience
• Iconography, e.g. Roman costumes are central to sword-and-sandal epics

The utility of genres rely on wider cultural acknowledgement and understanding of these shared elements – an understanding which is developed by audiences seeing many films sharing particular tropes.

Marketing and promotion have a significant effect on genre expectations, because how a film is marketed (including the poster, synopsis and title) usually signposts what genre the film belongs to. This, in turn, governs our experience of the film because we view it with genre associations already in mind.

Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) predominantly takes the form of a vampire horror film, and was generally marketed as such. This genre is evident in the film’s subject matter (the central character is a vampire who preys on several victims), emotional effect (gruesome attacks are a hallmark or horror films), and in some of the film’s style and iconography (e.g. extensive use of dark shadows and high-key lighting, the vampire’s sharp canine teeth, etc.).

However, it also mixes in various tropes from other genres, notably the spaghetti western (e.g. widescreen composition with significant characters/objects at the extreme left or right of frame, tight close-ups of faces, sharp and dramatic shifts in focal plane, etc.) and some additional elements generally associated with Iranian cinema (e.g. traditional Iranian forms of dress, the central significance of cars and driving, etc.). Through its combination, conformance and contradiction of these tropes, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is both an excellent example of particular genre tropes as well as an example of a film that significantly rejects and remixes those tropes in a unique way.