So, the last time I did a Breaking Genre post, I looked at Star Wars and considered whether it fit more as a Science Fiction or Fantasy series. This one won’t be as easy, in no small part because Halloween movies and Christmas movies aren’t quite genres? I mean, they are, but they aren’t. You wouldn’t say that A Christmas Carol is the same type of story as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, but they’re both “Christmas movies”. And that’s not to mention the huge gulf between Halloweentown and John Carpenter’s Halloween. What makes something a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie has almost more to do with the setting than most other genres, save historical fiction.
Just to recap, here are the categories I use to help define genre:
Who? — Characters and character archetypes. This is both generic stuff like “The Hero” and “The Mentor”, as well as more genre specific stuff, like “The Evil AI” and “The Hard-boiled Detective”.
What? — Plot. This covers the structure of the story itself, but also what other stories or ideas that the plot is based on.
Where? — Setting, or the place and time where the plot happens. Keep an eye on this one, it’s going to be a bit more tricky this time.
Why? — Themes or messages. It asks both why the plot happens, as well as why the story is being told.
How? — This covers some of the more technical aspects of the film-making process, but also the tone of the movie itself. How you tell a story is almost as important as why.
To help, I’ll be bringing in examples of both genres to help compare and decide, ranging from the traditional Universal Monster movies, to the classic Rankin-Bass specials. The film actually runs the gamut on that front, which is part of the reason it’s so hard to classify.
So, would you like to see something strange?
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10/31/2018
Back to Basics: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
valeriemclean1919 Frankenstein, Halloween, Horror genre, Mary Shelley, Science Fiction, the British Romantics About Writing 0 Comments
Happy Halloween, everyone!
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheusis a classic of Science Fiction, Gothic Horror, and Romantic literature (but not romantic literature, of course). It is also very different from the story you probably know. First published in 1818, Frankenstein was always popular, though it took some time for critical opinion to catch up– there was a particularly scathing review of the book in The British Critic that ended by saying “The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.” The review derided the book for the grotesque nature of its “disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures”, and expressing just how horrifying the book is, object to the wicked and immoral actions of its protagonist.
Of course, that’s the entire point, but they seem to have missed that.
Today, we’re going to go over the content, context, and themes of the book, and how they have grown into what we know of the story today.
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