As Barry Keith Grant notes in the introduction to his Film Genre Reader, “Stated simply, genre movies are those commercial films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations.” Precisely because, as he adds, “they encourage expectations and experiences similar to those of similar films we have already seen,” genre films proved to be significant in establishing popular cinema “as a cultural and economic institution, particularly in the United States, where Hollywood studios early on adopted an industrial model based on mass production” (Grant 1986, xi). Indeed, since the heyday of silent cinema, the notion of categorizing films according to certain types allowed Hollywood to standardize their production so as to market their films more effectively. The designation of genres, “each with its recognizable repertoire of conventions running across visual imagery, plot, character, setting, modes of narrative development, music and stars,” made it possible for the studios to target their audience by both predicting and catering to their expectations (Cook and Bernink 1999, 138). When genre criticism, in turn, emerged within film studies in the mid- 1960s, it served to articulate its dissatisfaction with auteur theory by recalling that conventions and formulas had, from the start, been at the heart of the Hollywood system. Rather than treating cinema exclusively as part of the “high art” of modernism, and, in so doing, privileging the artist as the seminal force behind a given film or set of films, critics such as Tom Ryall brought the notion of genre back into the discussion so as to once again engage the specifically popular dimension of cinema.

A dynamic and mutually determining relation between three equally constitutive forces is key, Ryall argues, to understanding genre films — the artist and his or her embeddedness within the studio system, the actual film product and the targeted audience with its knowledge and expectations. Thus, while generic rules, patterns, and styles help manage the creation, production and viewing of popular cinema, at issue for film theory is precisely more than merely a taxonomic system that determines which films fit a given category.