History of the Drama Film Genre

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addictions, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women and corruption put the characters in conflict with themselves, others, society and even natural phenomena. Drama is the most broad of movies genres and includes subgenres as romantic drama, sport films, period drama, courtroom drama and crime.

This interested me particularly because the "Split" film uses a lot of these dramatic themes and quite heavily too such as drug addictions (as Bradley Keano battles to leave his gang life behind and focus on structuring his future out), poverty as the film would be set in modern-day London and recession would play as an integral theme in the movie as the main protagonist also follows the gang lifestyle to earn money for himself so this means that civilians in London would still struggle from poverty and corruption as the gang he leaves behind to focus on his future and potential careers (e.g. football or career-wise depending on his school grades) so this means that the gang would be corrupt and attempt to play mind games with Keano (this is explained in better detail in the "Split Storyline" blog post as the climax of the storyline highlights the corruption in the movie).

Dramatic films include a very large spectrum of film genres. Because of the large number of drama films, these movies have been sub-categorized.

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If the sub-categories are coloured in red, this means that the following will be added into the "Split" movie and hinted at in the opening sequence:-

• Crime drama and Legal Drama – Character development based on themes involving criminals, law enforcement and the legal system. (This is one of the elements that will be used in the following "Split" movie)
• Historical drama (epic) (including War Drama) – Films that focus on dramatic events in history.
• Docudrama: the difference between a docudrama and a documentary is that in a documentary it uses real people to describe history or current events; in a docudrama it uses professionally trained actors to play the roles in the current event, that is "dramatized" a bit. Not to be confused with docufiction.
• Comedy-drama: is in which there is an equal, or nearly equal balance of humor and serious content.
• Melodrama: a sub-type of drama films that uses plots that appeal to the heightened emotions of the audience. Melodramatic plots often deal with "crises of human emotion, failed romance or friendship, strained familial situations, tragedy, illness, neuroses, or emotional and physical hardship." Film critics sometimes use the term "pejoratively to connote an unrealistic, pathos-filled, campy tale of romance or domestic situations with stereotypical characters (often including a central female character) that would directly appeal to feminine audiences." Also called "women's movies", "weepies", tearjerkers, or "chick flicks". If they are targeted to a male audience, then they are called "guy cry" films.
• Romance: a sub-type of dramatic film which dwells on the elements of romantic love.
• Tragedy: a drama in which a character's downfall is caused by a flaw in their character or by a major error in judgment.
• Drama thriller: a type of drama film with thrilling plots, characters, motives and style.