Sunday, January 18, 2026

Research - Genres to Consider, Film-Horror, Western, and Action

    Hey guys, coming back here again for another post. This time, I want to talk about different genres and how they're successful in their respective roles. When I was starting off my research, I immediately thought to look back on the genre slideshow we did a couple of weeks ago to understand and know the different genre types there are. After looking at that, I began my research with looking into the video games genre since I have a high interest in it.

    Firstly, when I was looking for information on different film types, I wanted to start in the horror genre since I love watching scary movies. So, I began my research and almost immediately found a great website that gives an in-depth definition of what horror is in general and examples of horror movies/shows. When I read the definition provided in the article of what horror means, I was able to get a better understanding of how we as humans develop fear and what causes the creation of fearing something. Saying how "...someone that is feared because they are different or misunderstood." This would imply that we as people can create fear in our mind due to the indifference of someone or something just because we view them as "weird." The Horror genre usually has the same elements and aspects that are shown when watching horror movies. These can range from how the setting is depicted, to how the plot is built upon from the beginning of the movie to the end. Also, many movies such as Friday the 13th have very iconic music that signify fear or the climax of the movie because they utilize it at the right time. This would be very reoccurring in other horror movies from older films to newer ones that still retain that same "spooky" element. Another example of a well produced horror movie would be the Alien movies-created by Brandywine Studios-mainly due to the dark settings that each movie is set in and shared the same concept Friday the 13th movies did when it came to producing eerie music.

    Moving on, I needed dive deeper into the film category and at I quickly thought of researching the Western genre. The idea of western films is to, obviously, portray the 1800s and how life was at that time with movies such as The Searcher or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that both gave rugged landscapes and had themes like justice or redemption. Elements like these are very different compared to the Horror genre where the ideas such as upbeat or more action packed would be put aside and sticks to a more darker and grim tone. The article also explains that in many movies, like the ones I had just said, often show the characters to have specific archetypes. For example, there would the classic gunslinger who often would be the main character of the film and the antagonist could also be a gunslinger to create conflict with the protagonist. With this kind of style of film being more action-packed, it could give the audience a sense of hype or excitement. Studios such as Pixar have made western styled films in the past, most notably Toy Story which is a trilogy about the protagonist and his friends all being toys that go on little adventures and have large themes and aspects that represent a western style due to the protagonist being a cowboy.

 
  Finally, I ventured and researched my final genre which ended up to be action. Action is a very broad genre since you would typically see this in most if not all movies due to their always being a climax and could involve some sort of conflict or fighting. While I was looking for some informational articles, I stumbled upon this one article that was titled "The Action Genre in film and TV." While scrolling through this article, I read a part that gave me the exact definition of what the action genre is and it basically said that action films/shows are usually made with a hero and villain as the main focus. These two characters usually fight each other with one having very obvious good intentions while the other would have much more evil desires. A good example of this would be the film Die Hard which is about a New York cop called John McClane who is labeled as the protagonist since he was forced to stop a group of terrorists from stealing over $640 million along with taking over the Nakatomi Plaza Skyscraper. Adding on, there are some studios that popularized the action genre such as Warner Bros. who created films like Mad Max, DC Universe, etc. The action genre itself is created with the intent to entertain the audience with constant scenes of conflict or fighting to make sure the movie doesn't feel boring or repetitive with other scenes that might focus on more personal topics. Director Michael Bay was able to achieve this trait in his movie trilogy Transformers and he was known for always putting lots of explosions in those movies to really portray the action genre.

In conclusion, I really did enjoy this short research that I did to explore into different genres and I would really recommend that you guys do it too if your interested in films and their different genres. For me, it gave me lots of information about the different film companies that made certain genres very popular along with the movies that started those said genres like for example Warner Bros. and their popularization of the action genre which involved movies like Mad Max, DC Universe, etc. In the future blog posts to come, I want to dive more into the Horror genre and its subgenre to see the specific types that I can research and learn about. 

Until the next blog post,

yours truly, Nikolas Velez.

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Creative Critical Reflection

    Hello everyone! This will be my final blog post I ever make and I just want to say thank you to all that have read and enjoyed my posts....