The vast majority of films remain the same genre (or the same mix of genres) throughout their entire runtime, but every so often a film that seems to be telling one kind of story switches to another part way through. There are, of course, a few films where this abrupt change is expected from the beginning: Anyone pressing play on James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), for instance, has it in the back of their mind that the romance between Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) is going to be rudely interrupted by an iceberg, turning the love story into a disaster/survival story.
Below I’ve compiled a list of five films which I think brilliantly execute unexpected genre shifts. Some may consider the following discussion of these films to be spoiler-y—I’ll try to avoid major plot points, but if you don’t want to know anything about the twists and turns of these films, consider yourself warned as I will mention (or at least hint at) the genre switch in each. (The same goes for the trailers below, most of which tease or reveal a bit more than you might expect…)
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
I’m kicking this list off with one of the best-known genre shift films: Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn. The film starts off as a tense crime story, with brothers Seth (George Clooney) and Richie Gecko (Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote the screenplay) on the run for robbery and murder. Wanting to cross into Mexico, they kidnap a father (Harvey Keitel) who is vacationing with his two teenage children (Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu) and force the family to smuggle them across the border.
About halfway through the movie, the group make it to the Gecko brothers’ destination: the Titty Twister, an isolated strip club in the desert. There’s a palpable feeling that sh*t is going to hit the fan, but the form that sh*t takes completely changes the film’s genre. If you’ve managed to avoid the twist of this movie for all these years, then here’s your warning to stop reading…
It turns out that the Titty Twister is actually home to a group of bloodthirsty vampires who feast on their patrons, forcing our unlikely gang to work together to avoid becoming dinner. From this point on the film becomes an enjoyably violent B-movie; it’s pulpy, it’s bloody, and it’s full of fangs.
One Cut of the Dead (2017)
I’m a big fan of zombie movies, so I was down to watch One Cut of the Dead, which was written, directed, and edited by Shin’ichirô Ueda, just based on the zombie aspect; I had no idea going in that the film would be playing around with genre. Although some people think that the zombie genre is nothing but a mindless shambling corpse itself these days, I promise that One Cut of the Dead offers a fresh take.
The film starts with a single continuous shot that lasts 37 minutes. We follow a group of actors and crew as they attempt to make a low-budget zombie flick, which isn’t going so smoothly thanks to the demands of intense director Takayuki Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu). But his anger issues are soon eclipsed by the appearance of actual zombies. Desperate for the film to be a hit, Higurashi recklessly insists on keeping the camera rolling.
That’s all the plot I’m going to reveal, because this film really benefits from the element of surprise. Just trust me when I say that it becomes both innovative and funny, and while its first section may feel clunky, you’ll be rewarded if you stick with it—I even found myself wanting to restart it as soon as the credits rolled!
The Prestige (2006)
Personally I find Christopher Nolan’s films to be pretty hit or miss, but The Prestige is a definite hit in my eyes. Based on the novel by Christopher Priest and set during the Victorian era, this period drama film follows the bitter rivalry between two stage magicians, aristocratic Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and working-class Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). The animosity between the pair feels raw and real, and their various magic tricks are impressive and intriguing.
One trick in particular is more intriguing than all the others though, that being Borden’s “The Transported Man,” which sees him seemingly teleport across the stage. Angier is obsessed with finding out how this illusion is done and pulling that string eventually leads him to inventor Nikola Tesla (David Bowie—a truly brilliant casting choice). The film enters genre-switch territory at this point… and that genre can probably be guessed given the film’s inclusion of a fictionalized version of Tesla.
I can understand why the introduction of certain speculative elements might be off-putting to some who’d expected the film to continue as a psychological thriller (especially those unfamiliar with the original novel)—people who dislike The Prestige often cite it as one of their main criticisms, along with Angier and Borden’s destructive obsession making them unlikable characters (which I think is the point!). To each their own, but I leaned in to all the various twists and loved it.
Overlord (2018)
Overlord opens with an American paratrooper squad being shot down over France in a scene that is so chaotically brutal that it’s on par with battle scenes from Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016). Four surviving soldiers—played by Wyatt Russell, Jovan Adepo, John Magaro, and Iain De Caestecker—band together to complete their mission to destroy a Nazi-controlled radio tower near Normandy.
A good portion of this film plays like a typical World War II movie—there’s the evasion of Nazi forces, the infiltration of a base, and the befriending of a French villager—but the film eventually winds up in the realm of sci-fi and horror. Our soldiers discover that the Nazis are performing some disturbing scientific experiments—but what exactly those experiments are I’ll leave for you to discover.
All you need to know is that their scientific tinkering leads to some gory body horror, but it doesn’t feel that scary. Director Julius Averywent on to make The Pope’s Exorcist (2023) after all, so the scares tend to lean towards entertaining silliness rather than nightmare fuel.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk has a classic Western setup: it’s the late 1800s and the sheriff of a little town called Bright Hope must lead a rescue party into the wilderness after three people are captured by unknown (and allegedly cannibalistic) assailants.
For a while the film proceeds like a regular Western—there’s horses and campfires and shootouts, oh my! Our classically heroic Sheriff Hunt is played by Kurt Russell, who is always a joy to watch (particularly when he’s sporting fun facial hair!), but the posse soon develops an uneasy dynamic. There’s Deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), who is well-meaning but perhaps a little too old for the mission, Arthur O’Dwyer (Patrick Wilson), who has a severely injured leg but insists on coming along because his wife is one of the abductees, and John Brooder (Matthew Fox), whose morals might not be quite in the line with the others.
Once the film hits its third act, things take a turn for the truly horrific. Now, it’s fair to say that classic Westerns tend to have a lot of killing in them, but it’s not usually can’t-look-at-the-screen grisly. Bone Tomahawk, on the hand, offers up such gruesomely stomach-churning visuals that it turns into a full-on horror movie. If that sounds like your can of campfire beans, enjoy!
Have you got any recommendations of films that succeed in pulling off an effective or surprising genre shift? Drop them in the comments below!
