Schatz's Film Genre and the Genre Film

Schatz’s article makes many interesting and valid points about the relationship between film and genre, such as that genre film constitutes an attempt to restructure a “familiar system,” one recognizable and significant to viewers, in an original manner. This and one of Schatz’s other statements—that genre is “a range of expression for filmmakers” and “a range of experience for viewers”—from page 695, made me think of John Carpenter’s Halloween. Although Schatz doesn’t specifically address the horror genre, I think this film fits into his general notion of the layout of genre films’ plot structure, for the most part.

Where Carpenter runs with Schatz’s notion of genre as a “range of expression” is with the ending of the film. It plays with the viewer’s expectations of the horror genre in that it seems to at first provide a resolution in the form of Dr. Loomis’s shooting of the masked murderer and then reveals this “resolution” to be false. The camera at first suggests the killer is dead via a shot of him lying on the ground before revealing that he has disappeared via another shot of the same spot, this time empty. The narrative ends on this note and thus complicates the idea of the celebration of the “well-ordered community” that Schatz maintains the genre film does with its plot structure.