Genre to watch
Draw a film genre - to decide what to watch, or as a writing prompt.
Runs locally in your browser. Nothing you generate is ever sent to a server.
Press "Generate Genre" to see a result here.
Kind
Press Generate and a film genre comes up. The list runs from the eight genres every streaming service uses as rows to the narrower ones - folk horror, spaghetti western, screwball comedy - that describe a film far more precisely.
Scrolling a streaming catalogue is a poor way to choose, because every row is optimised to keep you scrolling. Drawing a genre first and then searching for it inverts the problem: you have committed to a shape before the algorithm gets a say, and the choice takes a minute rather than half an hour.
Set the quantity to two and write a one-line premise that satisfies both. This is a standard screenwriting warm-up and it works because most memorable films already sit between genres - a heist film that is really a comedy, a western that is really a war film. The awkward pairs are the productive ones.
A horror comedy is not horror with jokes added; it has its own rules about when to release tension and when to hold it. Treating hybrids as genres in their own right, rather than as combinations, is closer to how they actually work.
The list is filtered to the group you chose, then a genre is drawn using your browser's cryptographic random source with rejection sampling, so no genre is favoured. Batches without repeats use a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by the same source.
Press Generate and one genre comes up. Press again for another, or raise the quantity for a list.
Yes. The filter covers mainstream genres, established genres, niche ones, non-fiction and hybrids.
Yes, as a first step. Draw a genre, then search your streaming service for it - it is a faster way out of the scrolling loop than browsing rows.
Yes. Drawing two genres and writing a premise that satisfies both is a well-worn screenwriting exercise, and most memorable films sit between genres anyway.
Because a horror comedy is not simply horror plus comedy - it has its own conventions. Listing them separately makes them available without cluttering the main lists.
Yes. Each genre is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random source, so every genre in the chosen group has an equal chance.