A key theoretical area that underpins Media Language is the study of GENRE. Genre is a way of thinking about media production (INSTITUTIONS) and media reception (AUDIENCES). Overall, genre study helps students to think about how media texts are classified, organised and understood, essentially around SIMILARITIES and DIFFERENCE. In that media texts hold similar patterns, codes and conventions that are both PREDICTABLE and EXPECTED, but are also INNOVATIVE and UNEXPECTED.

The genre may be considered as a practical device for helping any mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to relate its production to the expectations of its customers. Since it is also a practical device for enabling individual media users to plan their choices, it can be considered as a mechanism for ordering the relations between the two main parties to mass communication.Dennis McQuail 1987, p. 200

In some ways it hold conventions of other genres, as such it could be considered as a SUB-GENRE film (a genre within a genre) or a HYBRID GENRE (a combination of two genres). However, overall, it could be said that “genre is a system of codes, conventions and visual styles which enables an audience to determine rapidly and with some complexity the kind of narrative they are viewing” (Turner p.97 Film as Social Practice)

. . . saddled with conventions and stereotypes, formulas and
clichés and all of these limitations were codified in specific genres. This was the very foundation of the studio system and audiences love genre pictures . . .Scorcese, A personal Journey through American Cinema (1995)#######}