Boozehound Films

Last week, I wrote about the Most-Watched Films Exercise, a technique I’ve used to identify the kinds of stories, characters and relationships that naturally appeal to me as a filmmaker. This week, I want to look at another exercise that I find incredibly useful when developing screenplay ideas.

It’s called the Genre Mash Exercise.

This one has been particularly important to my own writing because it was the exercise that helped me develop the concept for my forthcoming screenplay and feature film, Pretty Killer.

The basic idea is very simple: Take the conventions of one genre and combine them with another. It sounds straightforward, but it can be surprisingly effective.

Why Genre Is Useful

Genres are often treated as sets of rules that filmmakers have to follow. I think it’s more useful to think of them as toolkits. Every genre comes with a collection of familiar conventions, character types, narrative structures, conflicts and expectations. When an audience sits down to watch a horror film, a romantic comedy, a detective story or a heist movie, they bring certain expectations with them.

They have an idea of what they’re going to see. That doesn’t mean you have to give them exactly what they’re expecting. In fact, some of the most interesting films are created by playing with those expectations.

The more familiar you are with the conventions of a genre, the more effectively you can manipulate them. You can meet an audience’s expectations, subvert them, combine them with something unexpected, or completely turn them on their head.

That’s where the Genre Mash Exercise comes in.

Step One: Choose a Genre and a Core Trope

Start with a simple idea from a genre. Don’t worry about developing an entire story at this stage. You’re just looking for a recognisable convention, trope or story element. For example:

• A serial killer
• A heist
• A love story
• A coming-of-age journey
• A detective investigating a murder
• A haunted house
• A superhero discovering their powers

The important thing is that the idea should immediately evoke a particular genre.

A serial killer suggests a slasher.

A heist suggests a crime film.

A love story suggests romance.

A coming-of-age journey suggests, well, a coming-of-age film.

Now comes the fun part.

Step Two: Put It Somewhere It Doesn’t Belong

Take that idea and place it into another genre. What happens when the conventions of two completely different genres collide? For example:

What if a serial killer tried to perform a grand romantic gesture?

That’s the starting point for the forthcoming Boozehound Films feature Pretty Killer.

Or:

What if a heist story took place in a fantasy world?

That’s part of what makes Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn such an interesting concept. It takes many of the conventions of the heist genre and places them within an epic fantasy world.

What if a vampire story was also a coming-of-age drama?

That’s one way of describing Let the Right One In.

What if a superhero story was also a coming-of-age comedy?

You can see that combination in Kick-Ass.

What if a family drama unfolded across multiple universes?

That’s the basic collision at the heart of Everything Everywhere All at Once.

The combinations don’t have to make immediate sense. In fact, it’s often better if they don’t. The purpose of the exercise is to create a collision between two sets of conventions and see what happens.

Step Three: See What Happens When the Genres Collide

Once you’ve found a combination that interests you, start developing it. This is where you can begin adding the conventions of both genres.

What happens when the characters from one genre are placed into the world of another?

What kind of conflicts emerge?

Which genre’s rules take priority?

And, perhaps most importantly, what happens when those rules contradict one another?

Imagine combining a romantic comedy with a horror film. A romantic comedy gives you certain expectations: meet-cutes, misunderstandings, romantic gestures, emotional obstacles and eventually some form of resolution. Horror gives you something completely different: danger, suspense, violence, death and fear. Putting those two sets of conventions together creates some interesting possibilities. A romantic misunderstanding could become a genuinely dangerous situation. A grand romantic gesture could become horrifying. A character’s attempt to win someone’s affection could put their life at risk. Suddenly, you have a collection of possibilities that probably wouldn’t have occurred to you if you’d started by trying to come up with a completely original story from nothing.

Step Four: Refine the Concept

Once you’ve found a combination that sparks your imagination, start asking more specific questions.

What expectations does this combination create?

If you’re making a romantic comedy slasher, audiences will bring expectations from both genres. They will expect romance, but they’ll also expect people to die.

How can you meet those expectations and then subvert them?

Perhaps you set up a familiar slasher scenario but allow the audience to interpret it through the conventions of romantic comedy.

What is emotionally interesting about the collision?

This is perhaps the most important question.

A genre mash shouldn’t simply be a gimmick. Combining two genres because the idea sounds funny isn’t necessarily enough to sustain an entire feature film. There needs to be something underneath the concept that makes the combination meaningful. The genres should ideally bring something out of each other.

The Rules Are There to Be Broken

One of the things I find most exciting about genre filmmaking is that audiences already understand the language. If you show someone a dark corridor, they know something might be waiting around the corner. If two characters meet under unusual circumstances and immediately dislike each other, audiences understand that they might eventually fall in love. If a group of criminals sit around a table discussing how they’re going to steal something, we immediately understand the basic structure of a heist.

These conventions allow filmmakers to communicate information quickly. But they also create opportunities. The better you understand the expectations of a genre, the more effectively you can manipulate them. You can set up a familiar scenario and then give the audience something completely different from what they anticipated. That’s where some of the most satisfying genre filmmaking comes from.

How Pretty Killer Came From This Exercise

This exercise is particularly significant to me because it directly led to the concept for Pretty Killer, one of the most ambitious projects I’m currently developing through Boozehound Films.

The idea started with a very simple question: What if the grand romantic gesture from a romantic comedy was placed into a slasher film?

That’s it. That was the starting point. Romantic comedies have a long history of building towards the grand romantic gesture. The protagonist finally understands what they want, overcomes whatever obstacle has been keeping the couple apart, and makes one final, often elaborate attempt to win the person they love. It’s one of the most recognisable conventions of the genre.

But what happens if we take that same structure and put it into a slasher? Suddenly, the rules change. The romantic protagonist isn’t just trying to win someone’s heart. They’re trying to survive. The romantic obstacle isn’t simply a misunderstanding. There might be a serial killer standing in the way. And the grand gesture that would normally be charming or funny can become something much more dangerous. That collision between the two genres became the foundation for Pretty Killer. From that initial idea, the story, characters and world began to develop.

Start With What You Know

One of the things I like about both the Most-Watched Films Exercise and the Genre Mash Exercise is that neither requires you to invent something completely from scratch. That’s important because I think writers sometimes put too much pressure on themselves to come up with an idea that has never existed before.

Originality doesn’t necessarily mean creating something that has no connection to anything that came before. Instead, originality can come from combination. Take two familiar things and put them together in an unfamiliar way. Take a convention audiences recognise and change its context. Take a genre and introduce a set of rules from another genre.

Then see what happens. That’s essentially what genre filmmaking has been doing for decades. And the more you understand the conventions of the films you love, the more tools you have available to play with them. So, if you’re struggling to come up with your next screenplay idea, try this exercise.

Pick a genre.

Pick a trope.

Then ask yourself: What happens if I put this somewhere it doesn’t belong?

You might just find the beginning of your next film.