genre theory - Steve Neale

genre helps to minimise risk and predict expenditure.This is important because companies require a predictable income and need to budget. Genre creates familial pleasures - we see what we expect and enjoy watching the things we like. Genre satisfies our needs for entertainment and escapism. however genre can lead to repetition of the same conventions, leading audiences to become bored. in order to maintain an audiences interest, producers will need to maintain some conventions of the genre and use them in a traditional way, whilst also creating difference in others.

Steve Neale's theory is that genre is dominated with repetition and difference. genres may be dominated by repetition, but are also marked by the difference, variation and change. genres change and overlap with one another.

Hybridity, this is where hybridity can be achieved as producers strive to make products which have conventions of combined genres. experimental, classical, parody and deconstruction. 

The first alien film came out in 1979 setting a stand point for sci-fi horror as it was one of the first movies to create a horror motive into an sci-fi setting. The first movie alone created a huge audience and a big fan base because of all the support that the film had the producers made more films. the repetition on the films would only involve a sci-fi setting and the alien aspects of the film such as how they move, reacted and sound. this movie was the experimental stage as it was one of the firsts where it created iconography for the certain sci-fi horror setting such as the spaceships and the aliens. Star ship troopers soon followed the same steps as alien making it into the classical stage. tremmors in 1992 was made creating a more comedic effect making the genre go into the parody stage. Now the sci-fi horror genre has gone into the deconstruction stage with the making of cloverfield in this film they mixed horror scf-fi into a modern world and still creating the effect of the scare but also with realism.