Script Sanctuary

Each film genre - horror, thriller, comedy, etc - involves a set of conventions that mould the story in such a way that it meets or bends the expectations of the audience in a satisfyingly unexpected way. A genre isn't supposed to be a rigid formula, more a sort of framework. But you're not just working with a neat and tidy genre framework known only to writers - your whole potential audience has an intrinsic knowledge of this genre - this kind of story - gained from their entire film viewing history, meaning that they are very hard to please. Think of genre as being more like a torch in the dark - the audience should see enough to recognise the path, but not be able to see the perils up ahead or where the path ends.

For me, it's easier to think about genre in terms of schema theory. In cognitive psychology, a schema is a 'knowledge package' that helps us create shortcuts in how we process the world. For example, when we go into a restaurant, we expect to see certain things; tables, chairs, knives, forks, menus. They are part of our restaurant schema. This means that our minds don't have to waste time processing them and we can focus on more important things, like the person who's taken us there. However, if we went into a restaurant and these things were missing and we had to sit on an elephant and consume our food through a straw, we may wonder if we really were in a restaurant after all. We would probably experience something called cognitive dissonance, where what we learn and what we know don't match - we know that restaurants don't have elephants you can sit on to eat your meal, yet we have learned that this one does. So, our mind does one of two things: it either stretches the existing schema to accommodate the groundbreaking new Elephant restaurant, or it creates a new schema just for that one weird restaurant - a novelty. And this new schema may not hold the Elephant restaurant in particularly high regard.

Let's apply this very simply to film. In a horror movie, we expect to be scared. If we don't get scared, it's not a horror movie (makers of Godsend, pay attention). This is why trailers are also very important. They lead us to expect certain things from the film - scary, Omen-like kids for example. And if we, the audience, don't have our expectations met, the film will enter our 'Films That Are Bad' schema. If we are led to believe there will be ghosts and that we are watching a supernatural thriller, and instead there are aliens as a surprise reveal with no foreshadowing in the third act, this will not be interpreted as a good film. It creates too much cognitive dissonance in the viewer. Alternatively, if we can see the plot coming from a mile away our expectations will be met but not in a very satisfying way - the film will become a cliché and enter our 'Films That Are Cliched' schema which does not reside near the 'I'm Going To Watch This Film A Gazillion Times!' schema or the 'Future Oscar Winner' one.

The balance is a tricky thing and the best piece of advice is to know your chosen genre inside out so that when you've finished your screenplay, you can tell when your expectations are met in a satisfyingly unexpected way.

Unrelated to genre, my first experience of cognitive dissonance in a film was during my A-Level studies, when my English Literature class had to watch the film version of The Handmaid's Tale, a novel we were studying. There's a scene in the novel near the end when the main character, Offred, is just about to escape; the man she's fleeing from shows up, they look at each other, and then ... he sort of pathetically lets her go, showing that ordinary people are still human despite the inhumanity of the state. Or something. It was ten years ago. Anyway, not really a very climactic scene, so in the movie, he shows up, they look at each other, and then ... Offred STABS him to death with a kitchen knife! Blood everywhere! It was such a contrast to what I expected to happen that I, and the rest of my class, spent the next five minutes giggling hysterically, as in 'where the hell did that come from?' I don't think that was supposed to be the desired reaction.