What are genre conventions?

Genre conventions are the 'specific settings, roles, events and values that define individual genres and their sub-genres'.

We, as an audience, become rather highly conditioned to expect certain things within a particular genre, such that we can be highly critical of or even reject or distrust something that doesn't follow what we expect to find- i.e. if it fails to follow what we call its genre conventions.

For example, in a horror film we would expect scary, tense music throughout to build the tension. Another example would be that in a comedy we would expect exaggeration of the situation and usually a happy ending.

By Kate.