Stephen Neale – Prominent UK-based film theorist who has made an enormous contribution to the field of genre studies

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 and are added to the body of similar texts

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

Historic specificity – They are associated with certain time periods and tend to have been popular at a particular moment in time due to other cultural, economic or historical factors

Repetition and sameness – Genre text producers have a fine line between repeating successful formulas with only minor variations

Variation and change – Varying the genre sufficiently to still allow familiarity but also make the audience feel the product they are consuming seems fresh

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 they 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 and match up to both our experience of other texts and of the real world 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

Hybridity – Putting 2 or more different things together