The Wizard of Oz and the Birth of Genre Hybridity

This week’s reading described genres as living systems that balance convention and innovation. That idea came to mind while reading Alex Sergeant’s essay “Scrutinizing the Rainbow: Fantastic Space in The Wizard of Oz (1939)” (Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media). Sergeant argues that The Wizard of Oz didn’t just use genre conventions, but that it invented the grammar of hybrid genre filmmaking. The film’s split between Kansas and Oz, realism and fantasy, black-and-white and Technicolor, turns genre into a kind of motion. Its “dual spatial focus,” as Sergeant calls it, grounds the viewer in the familiar before releasing them into wonder. That structure became Hollywood’s model for how to blend fantasy, musical, and adventure without losing coherence.

Sergeant’s analysis captures what our reading describes as the “interplay of convention and innovation.” Oz takes familiar ingredients—the musical number, the quest, the fairytale moral—and merges them into one story of transformation. We recognize the comfort of genre, yet feel its edges blur. Looking at Oz in this way, I realized it’s the blueprint for so many “journey” films that bridge worlds: Star Wars, Pan’s Labyrinth, Harry Potter. Each one restages Dorothy’s passage through spectacle toward self-discovery. Sergeant calls Oz “perhaps the most watched example of classical Hollywood cinema,” but what keeps it alive is how it shows that genre moves. It isn’t a fixed category. It’s a rainbow that bends meaning across forms.

That insight also ties directly to our feature, Nope (2022). Jordan Peele reworks genre the way Oz once did. He fuses the Western’s open landscape, the sci-fi invasion, and the horror monster movie into a single story about spectacle and control. Both films ask: what happens when wonder turns on the spectator? Sergeant’s essay, though written about 1939, helps explain why Nope feels familiar yet new. It’s the same path Dorothy walked, only now it’s lined with clouds and cameras instead of poppies and tin men. Genre, for Peele and Fleming alike, isn’t a set of boundaries, but a language that keeps rewriting itself.