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Recently my sister and I had a lot of fun overhauling and organising the DVD press at home. 300-odd DVDs to be put in something approximating order - it's tonnes of fun! What? I've mild OCD, okay? I actually like stuff like that. Sitting on the floor with stacks of DVDs around us, sorting them into the approproiate piles ... Anyway, we've tried various systems before - alphabetical, chronological - but this time we went with genre. And then we had some problems.
The basic list included War (waaay too many, thanks to my dad), Crime/Thriller (again, loads, but we all chipped in there), Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Disaster Movies (thankfully few), Westerns, Comedy, Drama (basically, anything that wasn't any of the others), and TV Series (which is a medium, not a genre, but we had to put all those damn boxsets together for storage reasons). Which worked okay until we met things like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Is that comedy, or crime/film noir, or fantasy, considering the title character is a talking rabbit? We went with comedy after input from my dad ( though I was pushing for crime) based on the fact that the main element/theme was the need for laughter/fantasy, and the fact that the movie is damned funny.
But it got me thinking, after a few like that, about how we were defining genre. I mean, most of the horror I know isn't actually horror to me. Dracula was Victorian porn with a supernatural twist. Frankenstein I would have rated primarily as a drama, a coming of age story from an extreme outsider POV, and a comment on society that just happened to have horror/sci-fi elements as the main plot. Interview With a Vampire is a period drama with overtones of gay romance, just with vampires. We ended up putting Alien in with the Horror instead of the Sci-fi, because of the whole monster/haunted-house-in-space thing, while Aliens did end up in Sci-fi, after considering a detour to War or Diaster Movie. It got confusing, and lots ended up just in best guess or first instinct.
How do things end up in one genre or another? Lots are multigenre, or cross-genre, or don't actually have a genre of their own yet (most of those ended up in Drama). That's why libraries have maybe a sci-fi/fantasy section, and then a big 'Fiction' section, I think.
How about you guys?
The basic list included War (waaay too many, thanks to my dad), Crime/Thriller (again, loads, but we all chipped in there), Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Disaster Movies (thankfully few), Westerns, Comedy, Drama (basically, anything that wasn't any of the others), and TV Series (which is a medium, not a genre, but we had to put all those damn boxsets together for storage reasons). Which worked okay until we met things like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Is that comedy, or crime/film noir, or fantasy, considering the title character is a talking rabbit? We went with comedy after input from my dad ( though I was pushing for crime) based on the fact that the main element/theme was the need for laughter/fantasy, and the fact that the movie is damned funny.
But it got me thinking, after a few like that, about how we were defining genre. I mean, most of the horror I know isn't actually horror to me. Dracula was Victorian porn with a supernatural twist. Frankenstein I would have rated primarily as a drama, a coming of age story from an extreme outsider POV, and a comment on society that just happened to have horror/sci-fi elements as the main plot. Interview With a Vampire is a period drama with overtones of gay romance, just with vampires. We ended up putting Alien in with the Horror instead of the Sci-fi, because of the whole monster/haunted-house-in-space thing, while Aliens did end up in Sci-fi, after considering a detour to War or Diaster Movie. It got confusing, and lots ended up just in best guess or first instinct.
How do things end up in one genre or another? Lots are multigenre, or cross-genre, or don't actually have a genre of their own yet (most of those ended up in Drama). That's why libraries have maybe a sci-fi/fantasy section, and then a big 'Fiction' section, I think.
How about you guys?
