Genre Films and Cultural Myth

Whether they are set in the past or in the future, on the mean streets of contemporary New York or long ago in a galaxy far away, genre movies are always about the time and place in which they are made. Inevitably, as Barry Keith Grant suggest in this essay, they are expressions of the cultural zeitgeist, instances of society engaging in dialogue with itself. Genre movies may reflect, reinforce, question or subvert accepted ideology, but viewers enjoy them as genre movies whether they fulfill, violate or thwart conventions and expectations.