Through the 1930s, a wide variety of subgenres
developed: comedy of wit (Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble
in Paradise, 1932); romantic comedy (Rouben
Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight, 1932), screwball com-
edy (Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, 1934),
farce (any Marx Brothers movie), and sentimental
comedy, often with a political twist (Frank Capra’s
Meet John Doe, 1941).By the 1940s, comedy was perhaps the most pop-
ular genre in American movies, and it remains that
way today, although another group of subgenres
has developed, most in response to our changing
cultural expectations of what is funny and what
is now permissible to laugh at. These include light
sex comedies (Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, 1959),
gross-out sex comedies (Bobby and Peter Farrelly’s
Stuck on You, 2003), and neurotic sex comedies
(almost any Woody Allen movie), as well as satire
laced with black comedy (Stanley Kubrick’s Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb, 1964), outrageous farce (Mel Brooks’s
The Producers, 1968, and Susan Stroman’s musical
remake, 2005), and a whole subgenre of comedy
that is associated with the comedian’s name: Alec
Guinness, Jacques Tati, Jim Carrey, Whoopi Gold-
berg, and Will Ferrell, to name but a few.
The recent wave of what film critic Stephen
Holden calls the “boys-will-be-babies-until-they-are-
forced-to-grow-up school of arrested-development
comedies”^6 seems to have spawned the beginnings
of a new comic subgenre. These genre contenders
(many of which are directed or produced by the
disconcertingly prolific Judd Apatow) include The
40 Year Old Virgin(2005; director: Judd Apatow);
Knocked Up(2007; director: Judd Apatow); Super-
bad(2007; director: Greg Mottola); Pineapple Express
(2008; director: David Gordon Green); and Todd
Philips’s The Hangover(2009) and The Hangover
Part II(2011). Women characters broke into this for-
merly all-male subgenre in 2011 with the hit Brides-
maids(director: Paul Feig).
On one hand, as a form of cinematic language, gen-
res involve filmic realities—however stereotyped—
that audiences can easily recognize and understand,
and that film distributors can market (e.g., “the
scariest thriller ever made”). On the other hand,
genres evolve, changing with the times and adapting
to audience expectations, which are in turn influ-
enced by a large range of factors—technological, cul-
tural, social, political, economic, and so on. Generic
transformationis the process by which a particu-
lar genre is adapted to meet the expectations of a12
The romantic vampireEver since Bela Lugosi first
portrayed Draculain Todd Browning’s 1931 film, forbidden
desire has been an essential ingredient of the vampire
movie [1]. In recent years, much of the horror has been
drained from the subgenre as audiences have fully embraced
the vampire as a romantic figure. Films like The Twilight
Saga: Eclipse(2010; director: David Slade) [2] and television
series like HBO’s True Bloodfeature attractive vampires
who are ambivalent about their sinister appetites and dark
powers, a contradiction that makes them irresistible to their
mortal companions.(^6) Stephen Holden, “Those Darn Kidults!: The Menace of Eter-
nal Youth,” New York Times(November 7, 2008).
EVOLUTION AND TRANSFORMATION OF GENRE 109