Movies That Launched a Genre

If you look at today’s movie releases, it feels like everything’s been done before and the original ideas are all, but spent. We’re getting hit with remakes, sequels, soft reboots, remakes of sequels, reimaginings, spin-offs, … you name it. An original idea is too much of a risk for most production companies so they’d rather just make an umpteenth the Fast and the Furious movie instead of taking a chance.

Thankfully, in the past there was room for experimentation and risk-taking, and it’s led to an array of movies that have changed, launched or reinvented entire movie genres. Let’s take a look.

James Bond (1960s)

Sure, spy movies weren’t exactly new back when Sean Connery first took up the mantle of James Bond, but there’s a deeper meaning behind the movie’s plot that did change how spy movies were made. This was the first movie where they actually made the plot a reflection of real-life political tensions at the time and had 007 take on the Russians during the Cold War.

Frankenstein (1931)

Frankenstein paved the way for movies about monsters being created against their will and rebelling against their creator. There’s a whole bunch of movies that could be linked to that concept, ranging from Blade Runner (1982) to RoboCop (1987) and even Edward Scissorhands (1990). It’s become a fairly popular theme in movies and it’s all thanks to Frankenstein.

Peeping Tom (1960)

While most people associate the birth of the slasher horror movie with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Peeping Tom fits the bill far more accurately. In fact, this movie had so many of the near-voyeuristic slasher horror tropes that at the time, it ruined the directing career of Michael Powell. The movie intimately showed the expression of the victims dying, and audiences weren’t ready for that just yet. A few decades later, they couldn’t get enough of it.