Stephen Neale – UK-based film theorist, says that genres consist of repeated features (repertoire of elements and differences, views genre as a process

Repertoire of elements – repeated features that are identical and recognisable as a specif genre eg horror = dark, jump scares, night, groups of people

Corpus – Genres evolve as new texts are added to similar texts, some differences are added to engage the audience, body of the genre

Hybridisation – The merging of different genres to create a sub-genre , more than one genre in a text

Historic specificity – Genres that are associated with certain periods of time and were popular at a certain time

Repetition and sameness – Texts could get boring if the they’re exactly the same as other texts

Variation and change – Variations / new features need to be added so the audience remains interested and doesn’t feel like it’s something they’ve seen before

Narrative image – Tells a story through moving image, and closely follows a narrative structure to similar texts in that genre

Expectations and hypotheses – Audiences like to predict what’s going to happen, eg in a horror film you can tell when something’s going to happen like a jump scare because the music builds up or it’s silent and the camera’s moving rapidly between shots

Suspend disbelief – The audience needs to care about the characters in order for them to remain interested in the text this can be done by making them think a certain thing may happen (audience positioning)

Generic regime of verisimilitude – making things very similar so they’re believable

• Conventions and rules – There are certain rules / structures / features that need to be included in a text to make it a certain genre

• Sub-genre – A genre that has derived from the original main genre but doesn’t contain all of the required features and can have differences to this as well

Genres of order – Value individualism and personal sacrifice, violence justified in some situations, heroes’ role = reinstate social order

genres of integration – Value collectives and groups who communicate and operate for the general good, integrate threat to equilibrium to community

• ‘Genre as cultural category’ –