Curated category
Film genres
- Detective fictionDetective fiction has a question at its heart: who did it? That question has driven readers through locked rooms, fog-wrapped London streets, and dusty…
- Drama (film and television)Drama, as a category of film and television, carries a deceptively simple name for something that covers nearly the entire emotional range of storytelling.
- SatireSatire is one of the oldest tools humanity has ever picked up to fight power. When philosopher Plato was asked by a friend for a book that would help him…
- Horror filmHorror film is a genre built on a paradox: audiences pay to be frightened. Film theorist Noël Carroll put the puzzle plainly in his book The Philosophy of…
- Slasher filmSlasher films are among the most commercially successful and culturally contentious subgenres in cinema history. A masked figure stalks a group of teens…
- Dark humorSaint Lawrence was being burned alive on a rotisserie, and he had a line ready. "Turn me over. I'm done on this side," he is said to have quipped during his…
- B movieThe B movie has two lives, and they contradict each other. The first life: a cheap filler film, stapled to the bottom of a double bill, ignored by critics…
- Independent filmIndependent film carries a word that sounds simple enough: independent. But in 1908, when the Motion Picture Patents Company locked up every major patent…
- CartoonThe cartoon began its life not in a newspaper or a children's Saturday morning lineup, but in Renaissance Italy, as a large, careful drawing on heavy paper…
- Splatter filmSplatter film is a subgenre of horror built around a single, unsettling proposition: that the human body is fragile, and that fragility can be turned into…
- Music videoThe music video is one of those art forms so embedded in modern life that its origins feel almost invisible. Yet the story of how moving images came to…