Wow! This is a really nice collection of examples. Thank you for the shoutout!
I wish I had mentioned 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.'
That first movie repeatedly recontextualizes itself and subverts expectations, most notably by creating the impression that it's really a classic historical adventure movie before revealing itself to be a fantasy/horror film an hour into the running time.
That’s also another example of giving it all away in the trailers. Then again, it’s based on the Disney ride which had all of those fantasy elements in from the start, so I suppose they expected everyone to already know what was going to happen.
For my money, the Disney ride is much better than the film. And I’m quite fond of the film!
I don't think I actually saw any trailers before watching it for the first time and never went on the ride, so was pleasantly surprised. Imo, easily one of the best examples of truly postmodern films and the start of a great trilogy.
Well, I guess you're the exception that proves the rule on the current dogma that anyone whose favorite film is "Fight Club" is an incel asshole.
"Psycho" is another genre twister.
I'm going to toss out most of writings of HP Lovecraft. While noted as a "horror" writer, he is, in fact, writing science fiction. All the entities of the Cthulhu Mythos use technology (like the Yith using time travel to find where in their future move their species to avoid catastrophic climate change, or the Mi-Go attempting to learn about humans by sticking brains in life support jars and interrogating those minds on Pluto), and "non-Euclidean mathematics" (every other story). While the stories have the trappings of horror, that's the viewpoint of the protagonists, who are incapable of comprehending the high science in use, and cannot accept alien lifeforms going about their own business while not giving one damn about humanity. The "horror" comes from the premise that humans aren't special. The mechanics of the universe are sci-fi from the viewpoint of characters who don't know what genre they're in.
There are exceptions in Lovecraft - "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" is pure fantasy, and Lovecraft's ghouls certainly seem magical, but these seeming exceptions may be the fault of me as commentator.
"The Thirteenth Floor" is another example. It begins as a 1940's noir-thriller, and ends in a similar setup as "The Matrix." "Matrix" was released several months AFTER "The Thirteenth Floor," and is actually a better movie. It was just low key and contemplative instead of featuring ridiculous violence and extensive special effects.
"The Matrix" itself tries to pull a genre switch, but they twist was spoiled in the initial ad campaign ("The Matrix" also had "bullet time" coined to name a visual effect which had already been used for YEARS in Hollywood projects, and, for which, the base technique dates back to the 1880s - which I mention as a grumpy pedant). Of course, "The Matrix" pops back here because it's only recently been made explicit that the movie is REALLY about coming to the realization of one's transgender nature and beginning a transition.
I've got other examples, but I've taken enough of your time.
Glad your feeling better. Unfortunately, whatever hit you seems to have worked through Laura and now me. I spent the weekend cursing the donkey kicking the back of my left eye to a double-bass speed-metal backbeat.
Psycho has been mentioned multiple times! Structurally, it's surprisingly similar to From Dusk Till Dawn: start off with a standard crime setup, then pull the rug and go more heavily into genre.
I only know Lovecraft through the things he's influenced. I've never actually read his stuff directly. I probably should!
The reveal in The Matrix comes too early for it to be on this list, I think. I love the film, but it's not about the big reveal: it's more important to the story to explore how the characters REACT to the reveal, rather than the reveal itself.
Sorry to hear you're feeling the sickness! That's the risk of subscribing to newsletters: the writer/reader relationship is so much closer, you can actually catch infections.
Excellent article, Simon — and glad you’re back from the awful fog! Jonathan Evison’s book, Again and Again, appears to be a sort of fantasy, a man who by some magic has the ability to remember past lives back over 2000 years, until you get pretty far into it and realize it’s something else.
The Ferryman by Justin Cronin starts off as a book about a future where the soon to die are ferried off to a special place and it follows one of the people in charge who has to complete the ritual for his father. Of course there’s lots of personal angst that goes with this final act and the hero doesn’t do what’s expected. Later in the book we learn that nothing can be taken for face value and the world is completely different than shown so far. It was a very cool story and a huge surprise.
Since you included a video game on the list, have you played Inscryption?
It starts out as a traditional card battler roguelike with a spooky theme, but when you “win”, you find out that what you thought was the entire game was just act 1 of a much bigger story
Oh, interesting! I've not heard of that. I have just added it to my Steam wishlist. :) Sounds intriguing.
I've played some really interesting card-based games. Have you played Signs of the Sojourner? A really clever examination of language and communication, by way of building a deck.
This was great. I love surprise twists. So much of movies, TV, etc. can be predictable. Fight Club is also a favorite of mine particularly because of the twist.
Good afternoon Simon. very much enjoyed your voice cast. Enabled me to listen and appear to be working! hope you're fully recovered.
Grateful for the mention, most kind!
some comments on your broadcast...
Arrival...as someone that suffered along with my then wife the awfulness of IVF, the closing scenes of Arrival were so astounding and resonating that i broke into tears in the cinema. It's one of the most brilliant understated moments in all cinema and it amazes me the number of people that dont even spot it.
I can point you to another incredibly twisty film. i cannot actually recommend it as entertainment as i found it to be so far up itself that i was just annoyed for most of the ordeal. however... "Memorias" lured us in mostly because it stars Tilda Swinton. I can't really explain the three points of note for me in this film without a huge spoiler so all I would say is... it's worth enduring its tedious acres of arthouse nothingness to experience quite a novel approach to telling a story. who knows. you might like it! critics seem to love it... audiences not at all.
Glad to hear the audio version was useful. I had to record it twice, so it's good to know somebody listened. :)
I can still viscerally feel my reaction to the Arrival ending. It completely floored me. And yes, the way it's told is very gentle, and understated, and quiet.
the recorded version is great and its grounding to hear a nice british accent here! i doubt i would do an audio version of any of my stuff... i dont think i do anything, yet, that warrants it.
If a story does a mid-plot genre flip, it needs to have a lot of audience goodwill and space in the fiction ('the budget of believability') to be able to get away with it. There's a huge risk that, at the point of the flip, the audience could turn off: 'this isn't the story I wanted to hear!'
For me, that raises the interesting question of what makes genre or mid-plot flips work when it's easy to imagine how they could fail. I think it might be when flips dive deeper into the core promise of the premise:
Dusk 'Til Dawn is essentially "a family with underlying tensions are put under extreme stress by an odd-couple pair of thieves" - the flip adds extra tension.
Fight Club is "a broken man looks for a sense of self" - the flip only reveals he's more broken than he knew.
Babylon 5 is "let's be even more Babylon 5" :D
-
These flips may stretch the budget of believability, but they're all within the scope of what is plausible based on the premise.
If Dracula decided halfway through that he wasn't okay with the harm he caused, stopped drinking blood, and started a puppy shelter instead, ending with a feel-good shot of him frolicking at night with armfuls of golden retrievers... I don't think that would work!
Agree with all of that. The flip needs to feel like a deepening exploration of the themes, even if the method is wildly unexpected. It can't feel like a 'betrayal', or a bait-and-switch. Figuring out how to tread that line is really hard!
Thanks for reminding me about Babylon 5, which definitely doesn’t get enough love. And Galileo’s Dream. Another KSR that plays with expectations is Escape from Kathmandu, which feels like a collection of straightforward mountaineering stories, until it isn’t.
And I’d like to think there’s something of this in my own series, particularly the first book. If I’ve got it right it starts out feeling like a fantasy but slowly reveals itself to be something else; a future that feels like the past.
I've not read Escape from Kathmandu. In fact, there's a lot of KSR I haven't read - the man is ridiculously prolific, especially considering the size of his books.
Re: Fight Club - Tyler Durden and Joe/Sebastian are one and the same, although the narrator is referenced as Jack in the film for some reason.
Re: The Sixth Sense - good film, but I've never understood the fuss, because the audience sees the psychiatrist being shot dead right at the beginning. No adult is ever seen supervising a young child with a random clinician. No one appears to be aware of his appointments, not the mother, not the teachers. Their appointments are never in a clinical setting. So, yeah, where was the twist, the big surprise? Is it genre bending?
I know Arrival was popular. I still felt it was sentimental, and yet another instance of humans needing aliens to tell us how to be better people, because we still can't figure that out for ourselves.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, or anything by Haruki Murakini are good examples of genre bending. Also some of Salman Rushdie.
From Dusk Till Dawn is such a great ride! Love the final shot of the rusting trucks out the back.
What about the godfather of genre shifting, Psycho? Looks like a simple noir-ish "secretary steals from boss and flees" film - and could have been a great one but Hitchcock then brings in "nice guy hotel owner" Norman Bates and his overbearing mother...
Wow! This is a really nice collection of examples. Thank you for the shoutout!
I wish I had mentioned 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.'
That first movie repeatedly recontextualizes itself and subverts expectations, most notably by creating the impression that it's really a classic historical adventure movie before revealing itself to be a fantasy/horror film an hour into the running time.
That’s also another example of giving it all away in the trailers. Then again, it’s based on the Disney ride which had all of those fantasy elements in from the start, so I suppose they expected everyone to already know what was going to happen.
For my money, the Disney ride is much better than the film. And I’m quite fond of the film!
I don't think I actually saw any trailers before watching it for the first time and never went on the ride, so was pleasantly surprised. Imo, easily one of the best examples of truly postmodern films and the start of a great trilogy.
Well, I guess you're the exception that proves the rule on the current dogma that anyone whose favorite film is "Fight Club" is an incel asshole.
"Psycho" is another genre twister.
I'm going to toss out most of writings of HP Lovecraft. While noted as a "horror" writer, he is, in fact, writing science fiction. All the entities of the Cthulhu Mythos use technology (like the Yith using time travel to find where in their future move their species to avoid catastrophic climate change, or the Mi-Go attempting to learn about humans by sticking brains in life support jars and interrogating those minds on Pluto), and "non-Euclidean mathematics" (every other story). While the stories have the trappings of horror, that's the viewpoint of the protagonists, who are incapable of comprehending the high science in use, and cannot accept alien lifeforms going about their own business while not giving one damn about humanity. The "horror" comes from the premise that humans aren't special. The mechanics of the universe are sci-fi from the viewpoint of characters who don't know what genre they're in.
There are exceptions in Lovecraft - "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" is pure fantasy, and Lovecraft's ghouls certainly seem magical, but these seeming exceptions may be the fault of me as commentator.
"The Thirteenth Floor" is another example. It begins as a 1940's noir-thriller, and ends in a similar setup as "The Matrix." "Matrix" was released several months AFTER "The Thirteenth Floor," and is actually a better movie. It was just low key and contemplative instead of featuring ridiculous violence and extensive special effects.
"The Matrix" itself tries to pull a genre switch, but they twist was spoiled in the initial ad campaign ("The Matrix" also had "bullet time" coined to name a visual effect which had already been used for YEARS in Hollywood projects, and, for which, the base technique dates back to the 1880s - which I mention as a grumpy pedant). Of course, "The Matrix" pops back here because it's only recently been made explicit that the movie is REALLY about coming to the realization of one's transgender nature and beginning a transition.
I've got other examples, but I've taken enough of your time.
Glad your feeling better. Unfortunately, whatever hit you seems to have worked through Laura and now me. I spent the weekend cursing the donkey kicking the back of my left eye to a double-bass speed-metal backbeat.
Psycho has been mentioned multiple times! Structurally, it's surprisingly similar to From Dusk Till Dawn: start off with a standard crime setup, then pull the rug and go more heavily into genre.
I only know Lovecraft through the things he's influenced. I've never actually read his stuff directly. I probably should!
The reveal in The Matrix comes too early for it to be on this list, I think. I love the film, but it's not about the big reveal: it's more important to the story to explore how the characters REACT to the reveal, rather than the reveal itself.
Sorry to hear you're feeling the sickness! That's the risk of subscribing to newsletters: the writer/reader relationship is so much closer, you can actually catch infections.
Excellent article, Simon — and glad you’re back from the awful fog! Jonathan Evison’s book, Again and Again, appears to be a sort of fantasy, a man who by some magic has the ability to remember past lives back over 2000 years, until you get pretty far into it and realize it’s something else.
VERY glad to be free of the fog. It's had a long tail, though - I'm still not back to 100% energy levels. Most annoying.
That book sounds intriguing. Will add it to my (very) long list.
The Ferryman by Justin Cronin starts off as a book about a future where the soon to die are ferried off to a special place and it follows one of the people in charge who has to complete the ritual for his father. Of course there’s lots of personal angst that goes with this final act and the hero doesn’t do what’s expected. Later in the book we learn that nothing can be taken for face value and the world is completely different than shown so far. It was a very cool story and a huge surprise.
Since you included a video game on the list, have you played Inscryption?
It starts out as a traditional card battler roguelike with a spooky theme, but when you “win”, you find out that what you thought was the entire game was just act 1 of a much bigger story
Oh, interesting! I've not heard of that. I have just added it to my Steam wishlist. :) Sounds intriguing.
I've played some really interesting card-based games. Have you played Signs of the Sojourner? A really clever examination of language and communication, by way of building a deck.
This was great. I love surprise twists. So much of movies, TV, etc. can be predictable. Fight Club is also a favorite of mine particularly because of the twist.
What a great run-through, Simon. Many I wasn't aware of -- so, good stuff ahead for me!
Add them all to the infinite backlog! :)
Good afternoon Simon. very much enjoyed your voice cast. Enabled me to listen and appear to be working! hope you're fully recovered.
Grateful for the mention, most kind!
some comments on your broadcast...
Arrival...as someone that suffered along with my then wife the awfulness of IVF, the closing scenes of Arrival were so astounding and resonating that i broke into tears in the cinema. It's one of the most brilliant understated moments in all cinema and it amazes me the number of people that dont even spot it.
I can point you to another incredibly twisty film. i cannot actually recommend it as entertainment as i found it to be so far up itself that i was just annoyed for most of the ordeal. however... "Memorias" lured us in mostly because it stars Tilda Swinton. I can't really explain the three points of note for me in this film without a huge spoiler so all I would say is... it's worth enduring its tedious acres of arthouse nothingness to experience quite a novel approach to telling a story. who knows. you might like it! critics seem to love it... audiences not at all.
best regards
Nick
Glad to hear the audio version was useful. I had to record it twice, so it's good to know somebody listened. :)
I can still viscerally feel my reaction to the Arrival ending. It completely floored me. And yes, the way it's told is very gentle, and understated, and quiet.
the recorded version is great and its grounding to hear a nice british accent here! i doubt i would do an audio version of any of my stuff... i dont think i do anything, yet, that warrants it.
Interesting how things align - "Sneaky stories that wear disguises" could be a companion piece to something I wrote a couple of weeks ago:
https://matahaggisburridge.substack.com/p/the-suspension-of-disbelief-versus
If a story does a mid-plot genre flip, it needs to have a lot of audience goodwill and space in the fiction ('the budget of believability') to be able to get away with it. There's a huge risk that, at the point of the flip, the audience could turn off: 'this isn't the story I wanted to hear!'
For me, that raises the interesting question of what makes genre or mid-plot flips work when it's easy to imagine how they could fail. I think it might be when flips dive deeper into the core promise of the premise:
Dusk 'Til Dawn is essentially "a family with underlying tensions are put under extreme stress by an odd-couple pair of thieves" - the flip adds extra tension.
Fight Club is "a broken man looks for a sense of self" - the flip only reveals he's more broken than he knew.
Babylon 5 is "let's be even more Babylon 5" :D
-
These flips may stretch the budget of believability, but they're all within the scope of what is plausible based on the premise.
If Dracula decided halfway through that he wasn't okay with the harm he caused, stopped drinking blood, and started a puppy shelter instead, ending with a feel-good shot of him frolicking at night with armfuls of golden retrievers... I don't think that would work!
Agree with all of that. The flip needs to feel like a deepening exploration of the themes, even if the method is wildly unexpected. It can't feel like a 'betrayal', or a bait-and-switch. Figuring out how to tread that line is really hard!
Thanks for reminding me about Babylon 5, which definitely doesn’t get enough love. And Galileo’s Dream. Another KSR that plays with expectations is Escape from Kathmandu, which feels like a collection of straightforward mountaineering stories, until it isn’t.
And I’d like to think there’s something of this in my own series, particularly the first book. If I’ve got it right it starts out feeling like a fantasy but slowly reveals itself to be something else; a future that feels like the past.
You should join our Babylon 5 rewatch. :) https://simonkjones.substack.com/s/lets-rewatch-babylon-5
I've not read Escape from Kathmandu. In fact, there's a lot of KSR I haven't read - the man is ridiculously prolific, especially considering the size of his books.
Re: Fight Club - Tyler Durden and Joe/Sebastian are one and the same, although the narrator is referenced as Jack in the film for some reason.
Re: The Sixth Sense - good film, but I've never understood the fuss, because the audience sees the psychiatrist being shot dead right at the beginning. No adult is ever seen supervising a young child with a random clinician. No one appears to be aware of his appointments, not the mother, not the teachers. Their appointments are never in a clinical setting. So, yeah, where was the twist, the big surprise? Is it genre bending?
I know Arrival was popular. I still felt it was sentimental, and yet another instance of humans needing aliens to tell us how to be better people, because we still can't figure that out for ourselves.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, or anything by Haruki Murakini are good examples of genre bending. Also some of Salman Rushdie.
From Dusk Till Dawn is such a great ride! Love the final shot of the rusting trucks out the back.
What about the godfather of genre shifting, Psycho? Looks like a simple noir-ish "secretary steals from boss and flees" film - and could have been a great one but Hitchcock then brings in "nice guy hotel owner" Norman Bates and his overbearing mother...
Great example! Can’t believe I didn’t include it. :)
Really enjoyed our chat today Simon! Also, Arrival is an amazing movie!
Have you checked out Sugar on Apple TV+?
I have not! I have an increasing list of AppleTV show to check out. At some point I’ll have to dive in and cross some of them off.