Film Genre

Most people think genres are simply categories on Netflix or Amazon that provide a helpful guide to making entertainment choices. Most people are wrong. Genre stories aren’t just a small subset of the films, video games, TV shows, and books that people consume. They are the all-stars of the entertainment world, comprising the vast majority of popular stories worldwide. That’s why businesses—movie studios, production companies, video game studios, and publishing houses—buy and sell them. Legendary writing teacher John Truby provides a guide to understanding the major genres of the story world.

Friday night, and you can’t decide whether to learn a new instrument, phone a friend, overcook a pizza or watch a horror film. But what to watch? Which witch to watch? You’ve seen all the Jasons, the Freddies, Michaels, Chuckies and Nuns. You’ve had your fill of multi-million-dollar schlock-busters. What about something a little different, something that might have slipped under the radar? A terror-packed excursion made by those who may not have obscenely high budgets to spend, but instead have the freedom to put real chills on the screen. Or those strange and sometimes lurid pictures...

A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is funny and smart but struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his family and their Asian American enclave. He tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal.

In an action-adventure epic that spans the globe, young street-smart Nathan Drake and his wisecracking partner Victor “Sully” Sullivan embark on a dangerous pursuit of “the greatest treasure never found” while also tracking clues that may lead to Nathan’s long-lost brother. Uncharted: The Official Movie Novelization is read by Nolan North, the voice of Nathan Drake in the critically acclaimed video game series.

Halloween Kills is an upcoming American slasher film directed by David Gordon Green and written by Green, Danny McBride, and Scott Teems. It is a sequel to 2018’s Halloween and the 12th installment in the Halloween franchise. The film stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle reprising their roles as Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, with James Jude Courtney also portraying Myers.

Evan Michaels struggles with being different, with having the complete memories of two other people who lived sequentially before him. He fights loneliness and believes he is unique until he meets Poppy. She recognizes his struggle because she is like him, except that she is much older, remembering seven consecutive lives. But there is something else she must share with Evan - she is a member of the secretive Cognomina. They are, in effect, immortals - compiling experiences and skills over lifetimes into near superhuman abilities that they have used to drive history over centuries.

The basis for the cult-classic film The Warriors chronicles one New York City gang's nocturnal journey through the seedy, dangerous subways and city streets of the 1960s. Every gang in the city meets on a sweltering July 4 night in a Bronx park for a peace rally. The crowd of miscreants turns violent after a prominent gang leader is killed and chaos prevails over the attempt at order. The Warriors follows the Dominators trying to make their way back to their home territory without being killed.

The long-awaited sequel to the NUMBER ONE BEST SELLER 40 Cult Movies: From Alice, Sweet Alice to Zombies of Mora Tau. Join critic and author Jon Towlson on a tour of 40 MORE cult movies! From Abbott and Costello to horror classics Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) to cult curios like Devil Girl from Mars (1954) and Castle Freak (1995), Jon brings you 40 more of the best cult movies around! Praise for 40 Cult Movies: From Alice, Sweet Alice to Zombies of Mora Tau. 'This is the best book on cult films since Danny Peary's 1980s series of books.' - PLAN 9 CRUNCH '...

When Warren has the opportunity to live with a female roommate, he instantly agrees. It could be an exciting change. Or maybe not. Especially when that roommate is the cold and seemingly calculating Bridgette. Tensions run high and tempers flare as the two can hardly stand to be in the same room together. But Warren has a theory about Bridgette: anyone who can hate with that much passion should also have the capability to love with that much passion. And he wants to be the one to test this theory.

On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive, cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova - a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than 30 years.

Diana O’Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City suburbs, all while climbing the professional ladder in the cutthroat art auction world. She’s an associate specialist at Sotheby’s now, but her boss has hinted at a promotion if she can close a deal with a high-profile client. She’s not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend, Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose on their romantic getaway to the Galápagos - days before her thirtieth birthday. Right on time.

Hilarious, profound, and achingly true to life, Jonas Karlsson's new novel explores the true nature of happiness through the eyes of a hero you won't soon forget. A passionate film buff, our hero's life revolves around his part-time job at a video store, the company of a few precious friends, and a daily routine that more often than not concludes with pizza and a movie in his treasured, small space in Stockholm. When he receives an astronomical invoice from a random national bureaucratic agency, everything will tumble into madness.

In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage and themselves.

COME BACK TO THE WORLD OF "B" MOVIES AND GENRE FILMS AS WILLIAM SCHOELL OF "GREAT OLD MOVIES" REVIEWS HUNDREDS OF CLASSIC AND NOT-SO-CLASSIC PICTURES IN THE CATEGORIES OF HORROR, SCIENCE FICTION, INTRIGUE, MONSTER MOVIES, ALFRED HITCHCOCK FILMS, SPIES, EXPLOITATION, CLIFFHANGER SERIALS, AND VINTAGE TV SHOWS IN A LIVELY, INFORMATIVE, AND ENTERTAINING FASHION. ILLUSTRATED. WILLIAM SCHOELL IS THE AUTHOR OF DOZENS OF BOOKS INCLUDING "CREATURE FEATURES: NATURE TURNED NASTY IN THE MOVIES;" AND "MARTINI MAN: THE LIFE OF DEAN MARTIN." A CULT HORROR AUTHOR, HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN SUCH NOVELS AS "...

Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She’s in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman. Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic.

When Myriam decides to return to work as a lawyer after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their son and daughter. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau.

Set in the wide-open spaces of the American West, The Power of the Dog is a stunning story of domestic tyranny, brutal masculinity, and thrilling defiance from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in American literature. The novel tells the story of two brothers—one magnetic but cruel, the other gentle and quiet—and of the mother and son whose arrival on the brothers’ ranch shatters an already tenuous peace.

As war breaks out among the colonies, a huge ship appears over the UPP mining planet Shānmén, releasing a horror that yields hideous transformations. Rescue is too far away, and the colonists’ only hope appears in the form of the vessel Righteous Fury. It carries the Jackals—an elite mix of former Colonial Marines and Royal Marines. Led by Zula Hendricks, the Jackals seek to rescue the few survivors from the depths of the planet, but have they arrived on time?

Unraveling the tumultuous, decades-spanning story of the Dolan family’s friends, lovers, and adversaries, Double Feature is about letting go of everything - regret, resentment, ambition, dignity, moving pictures, the dead - and taking it again from the top. Combining propulsive storytelling and mordant wit against the backdrop of indie filmmaking, Double Feature brims with a deep understanding of the trials of ambition and art, of relationships and life, and of our attempts to survive it all.

The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family's typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.