Citation

Shafiee, Rasmuna (2024) Pandemic-themed film as a subgenre of disaster film genre. PhD thesis, Multimedia University.

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Abstract

Genre recognition coincides with what a film is about through the identification of a few elements that make it a convention. A film genre is identifiable through its narrative and formalist conventions. Filmmakers, fans, film institutions, and filmmakers have different opinions on how to categorize a film in a specific genre. This thesis explores questions concerning the absenteeism of a pandemicthemed film genre classification and what attributes contribute to its characteristics. The pandemic theme film not only offers distressed content but also highlights issues on how to stay alive in a current pandemic situation. This type of film shares similarities with the disaster genre, although it has some specificity of its own, despite the film having been classified as a thriller for the benefits of marketing. These films represent environmental issues, which perhaps provide the identity of the pandemic theme film. Film labeling is commonly imprecise, and classification is always confusing and suffers from overlap. A genre for a film is primarily categorized by narrative convention for classification and secondarily by formalist systematic categorization. This research intends to classify a pandemic-themed film genre by analysing both conventions to find similarities between the four films. For methodology, a textual analysis was used to analyse the films Contagion, The Craziest, Carriers, and The Happening. As the film has already been labeled as a thriller, Altman’s, Bordwell’s, and Jancovich’s theories were used to identify the rightful pandemic theme film genre and find out how environmental issues shape disease culture in Hollywood film production. The findings found that all films share similar patterns, which resulted in distinguishing the film style of a pandemic theme film that not only promotes a popular disease culture but also places a pandemic theme film category as an extension of the disaster fourth cycle.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	Call No.: PN1995 .R37 2024
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Film genres
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Divisions:	Faculty of Creative Multimedia (FCM)
Depositing User:	Ms Nurul Iqtiani Ahmad
Date Deposited:	01 Oct 2025 08:11
Last Modified:	01 Oct 2025 08:11
URII:	http://shdl.mmu.edu.my/id/eprint/14652

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