Hollywood, and streaming services, just love putting their movies into neat little boxes. How would, for instance, Netflix and Amazon Prime sort their movies without the horror, drama, romance and science fiction categories?
But sometimes a movie will come along that can stake a claim to two different genres at the same time. Here, then, are the big-time films that straddled genres and probably gave the movie sorters at Netflix one big headache…
1. Eden Lake (Urban Drama and Horror)
Optimum Releasing
Like an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show directed by James Wan, Eden Lake is a horror movie in which the monsters aren’t supernatural creatures or marauding zombies, but a gang of feral youths let loose in the English countryside. James Watkins’ ferociously intense, stripped-down slasher pits a posse of mouthy, hoodie-clad teenagers against Michael Fassbender and Kelly Reilly’s loved-up, middle-class couple.
Taking its cue from the American ‘hillbilly horror’ sub-genre (see Wrong Turn, Timber Falls or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Eden Lake is an unflinchingly brutal and unsettling watch. Hug one of these hoodies at your peril.
2. Cowboys & Aliens (Western and Sci-Fi)
With its confidently direct does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title, Cowboys & Aliens headlined Daniel Craig as a man with a mysterious past who finds himself defending the Old West town of Absolution from invading extraterrestrials. All the Western elements are snugly in place in Jon Favreau’s fruity genre-jumper, the enigmatic stranger coming to town, the noble sheriff, the crooked family that terrorises the town… Then it all goes batshit sci-fi crazy as an army of xenomorphic critters decide to attack.
Sadly, despite its one-of-a-kind premise and stellar cast (Daniel Craig! Harrison Ford! Olivia Wilde! Sam Rockwell!), Cowboys & Aliens landed to middling write-ups and dismal box office (beaten by The Smurfs – oh the indignity).
3. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Costume Drama and Horror)
Screen Gems
It’s staggering that it took 200 years for someone to have the lightbulb idea of taking Jane Austen’s most famous story and reworking it as a zombie horror. Having started life as a novel, this surprisingly gore-lite movie version literally is what it says it is – the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy’s mutual exchanges of snubs and misunderstandings, only with added zombies.
So, despite the liberally sprinkled encounters with the undead, it properly functions as a bona fide take on Austen’s 1813 classic. In fact, it works so well we’d gladly take zombified retellings of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and Emma. Make it happen.
4. Bugsy Malone (Prohibition Gangster Movie and Kids’ Musical)
Paramount
You can just imagine the pitch: “I got this great idea for a movie – it’s a gangster picture, set in Prohibition-era America. Only it’s a MUSICAL! Oh, and all the characters are played by kids!” It’s fair to say there’s only one Bugsy Malone, a movie that triumphs as a rollickingly great gangster flick and as an infectiously catchy musical (tell us you don’t sing along to ‘Fat Sam’s Grand Slam’ and there’s no way we’ll believe you).
Also, it’s not every day you can watch a movie that boasts both Jodie Foster and Bonnie Langford in its cast. Beat that, Godfather.
5. Django Unchained (Western and Blaxploitation)
There’s as much Blaxploitation as Western in Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant, but chronically overlong 2012 epic. In fact, it owes a hefty debt to Jack Arnold’s cult 1975 B-flick Boss N****r, which starred one-time American football hero Fred Williamson as a black bounty hunter who arrives in a lawless Old West town, deciding to “hunt white folks for a change”.
Jamie Foxx (replacing first choice Will Smith) headlines as the eponymous Django, a freed slave who, alongside Christoph Waltz’s German bounty hunter, sets out to rescue his wife from a cruel Mississippi plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). Borrowing from two of Tarantino’s go-to genres, it’s a fiery mix of sweeping Western vistas and savage, splattery violence. He’d keep the Western thing for his next movie, The Hateful Eight, splicing it this time with an Agatha Christie-styled drawing-room murder story.
6. Blade Runner (Film Noir and Sci-Fi)
Warner Bros.
Though it’s often talked about as one of the greatest SF films of all time, for some reason Blade Runner is rarely upheld as one of the best film noirs. But Ridley Scott’s neon-drenched epic borrows as much from the world of noir as it does from science-fiction.
It’s all there – the nocturnal, smoky aesthetic, its crumpled anti-hero lead, its glamorous, seductive femme fatale… Look closely and the SF-ness of Blade Runner is remarkably light – the technological details of the movie’s future-world either aren’t important or are barely touched upon (how much do we really know about how Replicants are made?). In fact, the movie has more in common with the hardboiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler than it does Arthur C Clarke or HG Wells, especially so in the first original theatrical cut, with its sullen Philip Marlowe-like voiceover.
7. Bone Tomahawk (Western and Horror)
RLJ Entertainment
Despite its plot parallels with The Searchers, there’s nothing cosily Sunday afternoon-like about this one. Centring on a doughty Old West sheriff (Kurt Russell) who gathers together a posse to rescue local doctor Samantha (Lili Simmons) after she’s abducted by a tribe of flesh-eating savages, Bone Tomahawk is both a thrillingly old-style Western and a movie so bloodily vicious and unrelenting that it makes The Walking Dead look like The Durrells. Approach with caution.
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