Intro to Film 2025 • Professor Gregory Zinman • Emory University

Tag: #genre

  • Following Hitchcock Into Vertigo’s Shifting Genres

    I wanted to get into more older films as we’ve seen them this semester, especially Hitchcock’s films, so I watched Vertigo. I knew it was famous, but I did not expect how strange and layered it feels. The movie moves between thriller, romance, and psychological drama, and each shift changes how I saw Scottie and Madeleine. Hitchcock keeps adjusting the tone until the viewer feels as unstable as Scottie does.
    The early sections play like a detective story, with wide shots of San Francisco and slow, careful movement. Then the film tilts into something more romantic and obsessive, and the framing tightens around Madeleine. I noticed how the colors grow more intense as Scottie falls deeper into his fixation. Green becomes this haunting presence. When she steps out of the hotel room surrounded by green light, the moment feels unreal.

    The later part of the film surprised me the most. It turns into a story about control and identity. The shift in genre makes that control easier to see. Scottie becomes less of a detective and more of a director who tries to rebuild Judy into the fantasy he cannot let go. That change in tone makes the ending feel tragic instead of suspenseful.
    Watching Vertigo now, I realize how many films I’ve seen throughout my life that have borrowed from it. Hitchcock used genre as a way to expose obsession rather than hide it, and it was a bold shift.

    Vertigo (1958) directed by Alfred Hitchcock • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd

  • Violence, Myth, and Resistance in Dev Patel’s Monkey Man

    From the moment the camera prowls through the slum and the underground fight arena in Monkey Man, Patel forces us to see India’s stacked system of power not as a distant cultural curiosity, but as a brutal architecture. The cinematography does heavy lifting: oppressive low-angles, jagged handheld shots, stark contrast between light and shadow. All of it works to embed the caste system, not just thematically but physically. As Patel himself explains: “I was like, ‘I can use a genre that I love so dearly … to talk about the caste system of India.’” When you see the hero fighting through kitchen floors, back rooms, then penthouses, it isn’t just spectacle. It’s a visual indictment, and not one that’s a subtle allegory; it is loud and unapologetic.

    The editing amplifies that critique. Cut to raw bones, cut to ritual, cut to violence. Each transition hits like a message: the exploited become beasts, the gods become corrupt lords, and the viewer is forced to track this movement. The film doesn’t lull into comfort. Instead, it jumps—from clandestine matches to inflated political rallies, from masks to megaphones. Patel says he wanted “real violence … real trauma …” The timing of edits emphasises that the system’s brutality is cyclical. The oppressed fight, they ascend; the ascendants become oppressors. The cut-and-paste structure of action becomes the mirror of systemic churn.

    Castle (@CastleDead) / X

    Genre is where Patel earns his argument. He takes the revenge-action template (think John Wick) and injects it with mythology (the monkey-god Hanuman) and with the very real politics of caste and corruption. He says the hero isn’t “the guy who you knew was going to take on a hundred men.” He’s the marginalised. The underdog. That choice says everything. Genre serves the critique: spectacle draws in the mainstream; the content punches back. It refuses to let violence be pure adrenaline—it makes it a statement. And by doing so, the film picks a side: the side of the oppressed against the entrenched elite.

    Which brings us to the real-world stakes: Monkey Man is not just set in India; it is speaking to India—and the backlash proves the point. The film’s theatrical release in India remains stalled, amid reports that the Central Board of Film Certification has delayed or avoided screenings because the content is politically charged. Patel links this delay to real frustration: “We’re talking about religion and how religion can weaponise a large mass of people … it came from a place of rage too, against what was happening in India.” In other words, the system this film critiques is still fighting for control over the narrative. The censorship becomes part of the message. The elite refuse to let the message out—and that refusal confirms the film’s point.

  • 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.

  • “Nope”: How Its Cliches Make the Movie

    Nope(Jordan Peele, 2022) is a movie that has been on my watchlist since it came out. Many people have told me it’s one of their favorite movies, and I get it now. This is a film that is very good as creating feelings of tension with genuinely good jump scares, truly spine-chilling suspense, and beautifully disturbing imagery.

    In Nope, there are so many of the tropes we’ve come to know from horror. Danger at a house, a fake out scene, the final girl, and jump scares are just some examples of such cliches. The conventions drive our expectations as viewers and present some familiarity to grasp onto. It’s the subject content of the horror, however, that really draws out those feelings of dread. Peele doesn’t rely on cheap scares; he draws out the suspense and lets the audience stew in the disturbing events onscreen. The scene of Gordy’s Birthday Massacre and the Raining Blood scene leave particularly strong impressions, mainly due to the copious amount of onscreen blood. This contrasts with the rest of the film, which has almost no gore at all.

    Jordan Peele explains meaning of Gordy chimp sequence in Nope - Dexerto

    The relatively slow cutting allows the audience to slowly take in the scene, as the realization of what is actually happening hits. Furthermore, the long takes and sound design work together to keep the audience in a suspended state of tension. During Gordy’s Birthday Massacre, it was truly terrifying to watch the ape, blood on its face and hands, kill the people on set in such an animalistic way. No emotion, no remorse. Just violence. The fact that we saw the slaughter through the eyes of a young Ricky Park just added to the fear factor. To top it off, the gunshot at the end of the scene was so jarring it actually jolted me out of my seat. I’ll mark the experience down as another success of the horror genre.

    I can’t just lump it in with all of the other horror movies I’ve seen though. While Nope hits all of the beats of the horror genre, it also shows elements of westerns and sci fi. The warm color tones and California ranch setting are reminiscent of the western genre, and the conspiracy theories and extraterrestrial presence bring the monstrous energy of something otherworldly to the film. Rather than a scary climax, the final confrontation with the alien gives the invokes the essence of the classic western showdown. Tense, yes, but not horrific. There’s a commentary about the lengths people will go to create a spectacle and the dangers of tampering with the unknown.

    WATCH: NOPE — VFX & Cinematography Breakdown (2023)

    I wonder if the context in which Nope was made gives it a deeper or different meaning? What is the significance of seeing Gordy’s story?