The first of many: 10 movies so influential they accidentally created a genre
Only a supremely confident, and some might say arrogant, filmmaker would set out with the intention of making a movie destined to go down in the history books as influential.
That’s not to say it’s an impossible thing to do, but more often than not, it doesn’t work that way. Instead, a writer or director concocts a story, tells it the way they want to, and then the rest of the industry sits up, takes notice, and seeks to emulate its transformative nature.
New genres are an increasingly hard thing to come by in modern cinema, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. After all, creativity is an endless resource, but what tends to happen is that anything fresh, new, or exciting tends to be run into the ground in record time when everyone else jumps on the bandwagon.
Not many of the following ten features were the first of their kind, but once they’d been unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, they became the measuring stick that gave rise to an entirely new form of filmmaking that spread further and wider than their creators could have possibly imagined.
10 movies that created a genre:
10. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner wasn’t the first of its ilk, but it laid down a marker for how to create a dystopia that film, television, video games, comic books, and literature have been following ever since.
Sci-fi, futuristic stories, and technologically advanced societies all predated the film by years, if not decades, but the fact remains that every single noir-tinged, rain-soaked and neon-drenched cityscape permanently cloaked in darkness and fog owes at least a small debut of gratitude to Blade Runner.
The Ghost in the Shell universe, Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element are just the tip of the iceberg, with Scott’s aesthetic inadvertently giving rise to a subgenre that happily sang from the same songbook.
9. Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
The origins of slasher cinema can be traced back to 1960 when Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom arrived, but it was John Carpenter’s Halloween that took things to another level.
Once Michael Myers and his signature hockey mask had infiltrated the cultural consciousness, studios and screenwriters alike were on the hunt for the next easily identifiable and effortlessly marketable murderer with the potential to anchor a franchise.
By the end of the 1980s, audiences were drowning in not only Halloween sequels but an endless procession of Friday the 13th movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street flicks, the ongoing misadventures of Child’s Play doll Chucky, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre follow-ups, with Carpenter and Halloween turning the slasher into a brand-driven juggernaut.
8. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
There was a clear paradigm shift in 1990s independent cinema, and the reason for such a drastic shift can be boiled down to one very simple reason; everybody wanted to be Quentin Tarantino, and everyone wanted to make a Pulp Fiction of their own.
By the turn of the millennium, Destiny Turns on the Radio, Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead, Palookaville, The Immortals, 2 Days in the Valley, American Strays, Big City Blues, Suicide Kings The Big Hit, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, Phoenix, The Boondock Saints, Go, Freeway, Thursday had all arrived, and none were shy about wearing their primary influence on the sleeve for all to see.
Wisecracking criminals, nonlinear narratives, botched heists, eccentric characters, and pop culture references quickly became the go-to model of storytelling, which can be traced right back to the monumental impact Pulp Fiction made on the medium.
7. 48 Hrs (Walter Hill, 1982)
In what will quickly become a recurring theme for accidental genre-launchers, Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs wasn’t the first buddy cop movie to come out of Hollywood, but it was the one that led directly to the formation of the genre as everyone knows it today.
Take two disparate personalities, one of whom should preferably be a charismatic force of nature placed in stark opposition to a straight-faced professional, partner them up against their will, task them to root out and apprehend a common enemy, sit back, and wait for the tension to blossom into mutual respect, friendship, and, in the best-case scenario, sequels.
Shane Black came closer than most to perfecting the formula with Lethal Weapon, and it’s indicative of how influential 48 Hrs became that the parameters of the buddy cop movie have barely shifted since it solidified them more than 40 years ago.
6. The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999)
Cannibal Holocaust had caused such a furore two decades previously when its veracity – or lack thereof – was called into question, but found footage didn’t go mainstream until The Blair Witch Project.
Backed by one of the most ingenious marketing campaigns Hollywood has ever seen, the faux-horror ended up as one of the most profitable movies ever made, setting lightbulbs off in the heads of filmmakers across the industry, who suddenly realised budgetary limitations could be a blessing.
In no time at all, found-footage terrors and scary stories presenting themselves as either inspired by or based on true events flooded the market, but none of them managed to make a splash comparable to the film that kicked it all off.
5. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971)
Blaxploitation evolved into more of a catch-all term that ultimately defined a movement more than any single film in particular, but Melvin Van Peebles nonetheless got the ball rolling when Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song hit cinemas in 1971.
Recouping its $150,000 budget more than 100 times over at the box office, accomplishing the equally impressive feats of convincing the suits that stories geared towards African-Americans could appeal to a wide audience, and presenting a realistic portrayal of Black life and culture that Hollywood so rarely showed.
Three months later, Gordon Parks’ Shaft was released, and the blaxploitation era was up and running despite Van Peebles having no idea he was about to usher in a new front for American cinema, with its influence still being felt today.
4. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
A comedy classic that millions rewatch annually, almost every time loop movie to follow in Groundhog Day‘s wake has invoked the name of Harold Ramis and Bill Murray’s classic to get its point across.
Edge of Tomorrow? Groundhog Day, but sci-fi. Palm Springs? Groundhog Day at a wedding. Boss Level? Groundhog Day meets Die Hard. Happy Death Day? Groundhog Day, but a slasher. Triangle? Groundhog Day in the Bermuda Triangle, and on and on it goes.
Again, it wasn’t the maiden instance of a character being forced to relive the same day in perpetuity until certain wrongs were righted, but neither is it a coincidence that the subgenre never truly took off until after Phil Connors had found salvation.
3. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
No stranger to pioneering techniques that would eventually become commonplace, Akira Kurosawa is perhaps the single most influential filmmaker who ever lived, based entirely on how far-reaching his influence continues to be and the ways in which his trailblazing tactics remain so prevalent.
That being said, the Japanese maestro couldn’t have been able to predict that the narrative driving force behind Rashomon would become so well-used that it’s infiltrated every corner of film and television where the same central event is retold in different ways by different people depending on their perspective at the time.
Simply dubbed the ‘Rashomon effect‘, it’s been used in everything from Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden to Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, and even after more than 70 years in circulation, it isn’t going anywhere.
2. Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
Armed with nothing but a dirty white vest, feet full of glass, and a fondness for a snappy one-liner, Bruce Willis‘ John McClane single-handedly overhauled the action genre by the time the credits rolled on Die Hard.
Once Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone’s musclebound glory days were gradually phased out, the dominant form of action-orientated storytelling pitted a lone hero against insurmountable odds trapped in either a single location, a mode of transport, or a lifestyle.
The Die Hard formula has been repurposed on Alcatraz (The Rock), on a bus (Speed), on the president’s plane (Air Force One), in a hockey arena (Sudden Death) twice in the White House (Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down), the Hoover Dam (Terminal Rush), a rock concert (Performance Command), and it still hasn’t gone out of fashion.
1. Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968)
Everything about the zombie that every form of media has been peddling for the last five decades and change wouldn’t have happened were it not for George A Romero and Night of the Living Dead, which is all that needs to be said about its legacy.
Thanks to a copyright snafu, it’s also the movie that’s been in more movies than any other movie, which has kept its ubiquity riding high since 1968. Romero didn’t invent zombies, but he sure as hell established the rules that would swiftly become tropes.
Shuffling hordes of the undead with a taste for human brains wreaking havoc on middle America reached saturation point a long time ago, but that’s a testament to just how deeply ingrained Romero’s low-budget splatter flick became.
