People watch tragedies on purpose. People watch stories about hope on purpose. Pulling the rug on the narrative promise of your story and switching tracks isn’t clever or interesting, it’s just lying about the genre.
If Midsummer Night’s Dream ended with everyone brutally dying, I’d feel kind of betrayed. If Macbeth ended with everyone getting happily married, I’d also feel kind of betrayed.
Yes! You have to earn your ending. They’re not supposed to be twists. They have to be built to throughout the story
You need to have the payoff match the kind of investment you set your audience up with.
And just to be clear: having that payoff match your investment doesn’t mean you can’t do a narrative twist. It just shouldn’t be a genre twist.
Bruce Willis turning out to have been a ghost all along does not change the tone of the movie. It just added a bunch of really interesting layers and depth to what you already saw.
Hector turning out to be Miguel’s ancestor doesn’t change the family genre of the film, it enhances it.
Planet of the Apes turning out to be a futuristic Earth where humanity had destroyed itself deepens the existential sci-fi dread but it doesn’t turn it on its head.
These are narrative twists, sometimes surprises, but they are not genre upsets. They are storytelling tools. Done well, they can be spectacular and add a lot to your story.
But genre-shifting out of the blue and for no other reason than “haha, gotcha!” shock value is not clever or intelligent. In most cases, it’s just sort of mean.
Setting expectations with your audience then laughing at them when they trust you doesn’t make you a good storyteller. It makes you a bit of a jerk.
So reblogging this again because I want to talk for a second that you actually can change genres in the middle of the story. It just has to make sense!
I only can think of two instances off the top of my head that make this genre flip works; Disney’s Mulan and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. They’re both well told stories, but make a genre flip work for very different reasons.
For Mulan, just as “A girl worth fighting for” ends, a completely different movie begins. Up until that point, it’s been a fun upbeat Disney musical, but after you come across this ravaged by war town, there’s no more sing a longs. This is no longer a musical Disney movie, this is now a period piece. And this works. They’re able to make the genre flip from a musical to a period drama because they already set the threads of a period drama running underneath the happy go lucky musical ever since we learned that Mulan’s father was going to be sent off to war despite his injuries.
Alternatively, we have The Lottery. A short story that starts out with a group of people getting together. We learn it’s for an annual ‘lottery’ and everyone seems completely normal, chattering about normal things, adults complaining about adult things, kids running around and playing. Nothing really seems unusual at first. We have absolutely no idea that it’s a horror story until the final twist where it goes from being slice of life to physiological thriller. As everyone grabs the rocks and begins beating down on the poor woman, we look back over the rest of the story and notice the clues we didn’t see before- the kids were gathering rocks, the father being so serious with his grim son. The horrible twist works because the story is just short enough we can’t sure what genre it is until it’s too late.
I also want to talk for a moment about one of my favorite movies, Anastasia- the 1997 film from Fox Animation Studios. Like Mulan, Anastasia manages to be both a period drama and a musical, but unlike Mulan, Anastasia seems to be fighting itself over which genre it actually is. It sets the story up as a period piece and threads throughout the movie, completely unknowingly to the protagonists I might add, a darker fantasy musical. It’s a good movie, and it’s an extremely satisfying ending to watch, but the genres twist themselves into pretzels and it’s the musical romance plot line that wins out. So, it works as a genre twist, but it only works because both genres were present at the same time, so regardless of which it ended on, the story would still make sense.
So genre twists can work, and if you can pull it off, it can work very well. But, as previously stated, you have to put elements of the genre twist into the story before you make the twist. Otherwise all you’re really doing is patting your own ass over how Clever And Special you are for taking the easy way out and writing a bad story.
Pirates of the Caribbean also pulls off an excellent genre twist going from period romp to horror/fantasy story! It’s really fascinating and exciting when done right.
Which basically discounts most of the media out there.
