Originally Posted by
Toadflax
You're twisting my words again. I didn't say "full blown" horror movie; I said horror movie. Shaun Of The Dead is a horror romantic comedy; it can be all three of those things without "full blown" being any one of them.
But I think we can agree on most of this and agree to disagree about the rest. I study and write about film and can say for sure that genre plays heavily into the writing process. When people set out to make sci-fi, horror, comedy, etc., they are working in a specific genre to make their thing, using the language and history of the genre to inform their process. That said, plenty of movies are cross-genre, and some are made without a specific genre in mind, but they tend to be much harder to greenlight, as studios get scared when they can't market the movie to a specific demographic. I did a deep dive on AQP when I wrote that video, so I can say with 100% certainty that no one making it was intending to do anything other than make a horror movie.
And I understand your point isn't about what the creator was intending but how about how the consumer perceives it—but there has to be a limit to how far you can take that. Do you get to decide whether or not a McDonald's hamburger is a hamburger? It may not be up to most people's standards for what they want out of a hamburger, but it's a beef patty on a bun and therefore, by definition, a hamburger. Technically, anyone has the right to say it's not a hamburger, just as anyone has the right to say 2+2=5, but what's the value in that? Plato spoke about a similar thing with his theory of forms. Basically, the same thing as the hamburger situation but with a chair. He argued that all people can agree that a chair is an object designed for people to sit upon. So it's about what the intention was behind the thing and whether it serves that function, not about whether or not the consumer decides it does. A person with no arms or legs will still recognize a bicycle as a bicycle, even if they can't use it for its intended function, you know?