There is much to suggest that the film sequel operates as a genre or, at the very least, as a sub-genre. As the previous chapter has shown, early formative exercises in film ‘kinds’ led to the western, slapstick comedy, film noir, and lately to a host of hybrid generic formulations to alert cinema-going audiences to what they might expect of any film that subscribed to genre codes. A number of theories describe the ways by which audiences are alerted, but central to the operation of genre is the address of expectation. In its repetitious re-organisation of familiar features, genre shares much in common with sequelisation. According to Steve Neale, genre involves ‘repetition and variation’, and according to Barry Keith Grant, ‘genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations’ (my emphasis). Similarly, the sequel is described as ‘repetition-with-variation’ by Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg. How, then, to differentiate between the two?

The immediate connection between sequelisation and genre is found in processes of variation, or, more exactly, in intertextual strategies by which ‘variation’ marks the modulations between textual reproductions. Such ‘variations’ or differences are crucial to the establishment of reading/viewing positions. The forms of interaction between audiences and filmmakers that occur in the genre film perpetuate stabilisation; a comparable process informs the sequel.