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This chapter reviews Johnnie To's enunciating role as an auteur of genre film through the convention of the happy ending, as a method of drawing certain conclusions about To's achievements to date. The happy ending is an ironic way of ending this epilogue, as will be made clear, but since To's career is ongoing and likely to contain more revelations and surprises, this chapter cannot make conclusions about his career as such, but about the way his films have ended — as a means to indicate To's contributions to genre and the art of cinema. To's ability to unsettle our perception of genre as a world of pleasure and closure is all part of his vision of Hong Kong on the road to Avici, but his action cinema carries a dialectical weight — fatalism carries meaning and redemption, thus the destiny of his films is something else entirely. The final action in the action films of Johnnie To is the act of inducing thought.

The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on television, in books, comics, video games and even fine art, as part of the project to locate the films within a wider cultural context. Science fiction has surely adopted material from both the musical and horror film. The genre of science fiction film allows the kind of debate witnessed among critics, writers and aficionados of the written novels. The chapter then looks at what might be called proto-science fiction films. These films came before the science fiction film which boom in the 1950s. It is shown that Metropolis had a huge impact on science fiction. The interwar films evidently address the political and social unrest of their times. Until the 1950s, the science fiction feature film genre actually started in America.

This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre criticism as a strategy for national cinema studies, as well as an elaboration of genre’s specific historical construction in Japanese cinema. It then explores how the middle-class film genre established connections with an audience of the urban middle class and how idiosyncratically the Japanese film industry employed genres apart from Hollywood in the cinematic modes of that period. It also discusses the politics of genre in Japan’s national cinema and the creation of a modern national subject in two films by Ozu Yasujiro: Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no gassho, 1931) and I Was Born, But… Finally, the chapter explains how notions of Japanese genre have been molded in cross-cultural misunderstandings within Western film scholarship, along with the culturally specific use of genre appropriation in Japan.

The “Introduction” describes the theoretical and practical understanding of what metacinema is and does in the context of Chinese filmmaking. Metacinema is a kind of textual reflexivity that foregrounds the mechanisms involved in the creation or reception of a film. Consideration of metacinema reveals a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. A key, but often overlooked, metacinematic category is genre: collective semiotic codes adopted, adapted, updated, or subverted that allow another vantage on the ways films influence each other. In the context of Chinese cinemas, this discourse ricochets amongst and between the industries of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. Further, focus on film audiences within films allows us to theorize the personal and social effects film watching has on viewers. The films provide models for ways of being in the world that characters within the films, and by analogy audiences in the real world, adopt, update, and subvert in their own lives.

This chapter discusses the history of the American boxing film from the coming of sound to the end of the twentieth century. It characterizes the chief cycles of film production in order to explain the cinematic influences, film industry practices, and social trends that shaped the evolution of the genre.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of horror cinema. Since its inception, horror has been one of the most universally derided and dismissed of film genres. Yet at the same time it has consistently been one of the most enduring and commercially popular. While there have been periods where it seemed to have reached a dead end, it has always managed to re-invent itself and rise again. Today, horror cinema is experiencing something of a renaissance, enjoying box-office success and even critical acclaim. The chapter discusses the concept of film genre and traces the history of horror. As with other genres, over time horror developed codes and conventions that became typically associated with what one would now term a traditional horror film. Since the arrival of the 'modern' horror film in the early 1960s, the genre has displayed a degree of freedom from many of its more traditional conventions.

This chapter defines the boxing film genre and describes its conventions, including animating conflicts, model plot, major characters and settings, boxing’s mise-en-scène, and the viewer’s typical emotional response, followed by a consideration of genre history. It concludes with a discussion of the goals of genre criticism and an outline of this book.

This chapter discusses the genre of Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). Nolan changed his mind several times about what kind of film he wanted to make. This led him to view the material at different times in terms of different genres. He has said that he initially imagined developing the general idea as a horror film, and wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers. As he set about writing it he came to view it more as a heist film, though even at this early stage he had reservations about conceiving it in this genre. It is clear that he was starting to envision something with psychological depth. The chapter reflects on the notion of genre in general, how best to identify and describe genres, and then on the characteristics of the heist and sci-fi genres in particular. It also considers the tech noir genre; films commonly identified as tech noir freely explore deeper levels of human psychology.

This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the basis of a diverse output: the middlebrow drama adaptations of Shaw and Rattigan, lowbrow genre films including a comedy thriller and a costume melodrama, patriotic war pictures and documentary dramas. Asquith resumed his directing career with While the Sun Shines (1947), and his next film, The Winslow Boy (1948), was a Rattigan adaptation in which he corraborated with Korda's revived London Films and British Lion. The Importance of Being Earnest, a version of Oscar Wilde's famous play from the 1890s, was his first film in colour. Asquith's genre exercises from the early 1950s, though containing much of interest – innovatory narrative structures, imaginative mise-enscène, lyricism, and poetry, the radical ideological questioning of war – remain little-known films on the periphery of the mainstream British cinema of the time.

This chapter evaluates Hammer horror as genre films. Hammer is renowned for its horror films, despite its breadth of productions including comedies, war films, action-adventures, and thrillers. Its specific brand of horror has often been considered to be a particularly English Gothic, Gothicism with its interest in the liminal, transcending traditional genre categories. It is poignant, then, that Hammer's Gothic style can be seen in some of its non-horror productions. One might question the usefulness of genre for understanding a range of the studio's films, despite the label 'Hammer horror'. Hammer brought something incredibly new to the 1950s cinema screen and it was the studio's juxtaposition of traditional fairy-tale storytelling and a return to a primitive cinema of attraction interested in spectacle and experience which has arguably earned the studio such a prominent place in the history of British film.

This chapter examines the “Oriental Detective” genre in Hollywood cinema during the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas most discussions of the Oriental detective genre have tended to focus on whether or not the character reflects a positive or negative stereotype for Asian America, this chapter analyzes a discursive convergence of machine culture, corporate aesthetics, and ethnic and racial stereotyping, pausing to notice not only what the Oriental detective genre says about American racial attitudes during the 1930s and 1940s, but also what it says about the corporate production of film and film culture.

This chapter examines the film, Raging Bull. It reviews the film’s production history and reception, and then analyzes the genre conventions governing plot, character, setting/iconography, mise-en-scène, and its dramatic conflicts to understand how Raging Bull adopts and transforms these practices to achieve its artistry. An awareness of the interaction of genre conventions with cinematic art offers an illuminating perspective on Raging Bull—for many the most stellar achievement of the Hollywood boxing film.

This chapter offers a critical overview of the serial killer film, especially in the light of the subgenre’s intense cultural significance during the 1980s and 1990s and its subsequent descent into relative insignificance after 9/11. While pondering the larger questions of why and how horror film archetypes drift in and out of the culture’s focus of attention, it also demonstrates how the serial killer film, though often pronounced dead, has instead managed to spread throughout a field of cultural production much larger than that of a strictly defined and narrowly circumscribed cinematic genre. The chapter argues that the serial killer has even made a comeback with recent high-profile productions directed by auteurist filmmakers such as Spike Lee (Summer of Sam) and David Fincher (Zodiac).

This chapter studies the genre and narrative of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002). The narrative of Talk to Her flits between a double- and single-stranded plot line, plays with time with sometimes careless abandon, and contains coincidences that verge of the ridiculous. But yet, far from alienating the spectator, the narrative of Talk to Her pleasingly draws one in and lures the spectator into a position where they are able to suspend their disbelief, enjoy and engage with the plot. The spectator familiar with Almodóvar's films somewhat expects an unconventional narrative and thus is likely to find it unobtrusive. Meanwhile, like most Almodóvar's films, Talk to Her is hard to classify in terms of genre. Unlike the Hollywood system that relies heavily on either star or genre marketing, the marketing for Almodóvar's films relies heavily on his own status as an award-winning auteur film-maker. Talk to Her is thus not bound by generic convention in the way that many Hollywood films are.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987). If one were to compile a canon of great science-fiction films, the inclusion of RoboCop would be problematic simply because of the puerile title. Given the way films are inevitably marketed, made palatable for audiences naturally means film titles are transformed to suit commercial inclinations, often conflicting with the content of a film. In terms of high-concept cinema, the title RoboCop is a moribund simplification of the film's existential core. Yet it is such outward simplicity that fosters a contradiction often lurking in Hollywood-genre films like RoboCop. RoboCop's reputation was an early source of ridicule, such was the fate of many violent films of the 1980s when sanitised by the puritanism of the BBC or ITV. Fortuitously, the critical standing of RoboCop has grown over the years, in no small part aided by the intervention of Criterion, a specialist home video label which was first to re-release the film on Laserdisc and then later on DVD in an unrated directors cut. While the Criterion edition of RoboCop has long been out of print, the film's inclusion in the Criterion library accentuates its merit as a seminal science-fiction film; a key American work of the 1980s, overturning familiar genre trappings while its erudite philosophical address transforms the iconic Frankenstein narrative into an altogether more radical, theological work.