101 Genre Mixing Story Tips – ScreenCraft

Do you want to write a genre screenplay but need help creating a convincing different style through creative genre mixing? Sometimes reading simple genre story prompts is the easiest way to spark creative ideas.

Our ideas come from many sources:

• News headlines, novels, TV shows, movies, our lives, our fears, our phobias, and more.
• Movies or series sometimes leave scenes or moments unexplored.
• A single visual attracts the creative mind, planting a seed that keeps growing until the author is forced to finally put it down on paper or screen.

They might inspire a screenplay, novel, short story, or even smaller moments that you can include in a story you’ve already written.

With that in mind, here are 101 genre-bending story prompts to get your creative juices flowing.

101 Genre Mixing Story Prompts

1. Zombies in a space station.
2. Vampires in a space station.
3. A werewolf in a space station.
4. A planet full of vampires with only one hour of sunlight.
5. Dracula wakes up after sleeping for hundreds of years.
6. Top Gun in space.
7. Top Gun With the SEALs.
8. A noir suspense film set in the future.
9. A noir suspense film set on a space station.
10. Wild west gunslingers face off against aliens.
11. A Wild West gunslinger is transported into the future.
12. Space musical.
13. Titanic in space.
14. “Boots,” a ground war movie set on another planet.
15. A heist movie where the team must venture underwater to steal something from a submarine.
16. Robot society creates the “first” organic human intelligence.
17. A romantic comedy set on a spaceship.
18. Romeo and Juliet With human males and alien females.
19. A frontier movie set on a fantasy planet.
20. Horror movie set in the old west.
21. An alien invasion movie where humans are the invaders from another planet.
22. A buddy movie where the hero and heroine and the villain must work together.
23. A space rescue team must deal with human settlers who have turned into cannibals.
24. A disaster movie set on another planet.
25. A gangster movie set on a desert planet.
26. A found footage from a time travel movie.
27. This is a world of superheroes where everyone has lost their powers.
28. A human boy who travels through space is abandoned on an alien planet and befriends an alien boy and his family.
29. Die Hard On a spaceship.
30. Die Hard On the space station.
31. Die Hard In an old west town.
32. A courtroom drama set in the Old West.
33. Space travelers stumble upon a planet similar to Earth’s fantasy stories, complete with knights, dragons, wizards and more.
34. Space road movie.
35. A road movie set in the Old West.
36. Haunted spaceship or space station.
37. A detective murder mystery that takes place on a space station or aboard a spaceship.
38. george lucas Star Wars The universe is actually based on a place he visited.
39. Ghostbusters Meet the Old West.
40. Peter Pan is a monster villain.
41. A historian discovers that Dracula was real.
42. Dracula immigrated to the United States and became an underground crime boss.
43. Van Helsing is actually the villain of the Dracula story.
44. One of the greatest treasures is hidden within Dracula’s castle, protected by vampires and werewolves and hunted by treasure hunters.
45. A historian has discovered that Dr. Frankenstein was real.
46. Frankenstein’s monster was never actually killed. To this day, he still lives in the mountains, and Dr. Frankenstein’s relatives continue to replace him with new body parts.
47. A man named Frankenstein realizes that he is the great-great-grandson of Dr. Frankenstein himself. He is a loser in life and tries to hilariously recreate the works of his ancestors.
48. contemporary retelling Phantom of the Opera Set against the backdrop of a Broadway stage.
49. contemporary retelling Phantom of the Opera The play is set in a high school production and stars an outcast teen as the “ghost.”
50. contemporary retelling Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde The story is set in the political world.
51. A man discovers that his grandfather is the original Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Jekyll. Hyde, who also began to experience the same split personality.
52. A contemporary retelling of the story, with the heroines being Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde.
53. An archaeologist has discovered evidence that King Arthur and Excalibur were real.
54. High school students studying abroad found Excalibur.
55. The Knights of the Round Table found the Holy Grail, gained immortality, and are still fighting for the greater good on Earth.
56. A space opera version of the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
57. modern version Robin Hood The story takes place on Wall Street and the world of high-stakes trading.
58. Bank robbers robbed the rich and helped the poor—later known as Robin Hoods.
59. An Old West version of the Robin Hood story.
60. In this version, Robin Hood is the villain and the Sheriff of Nottingham is the hero.
61. space version Twenty thousand miles under the sea.
62. animated feature version Sherlock Holmes Focus on Sherlock Holmes’ dog and unravel the mysteries of a pet’s life.
63. A serial killer is reenacting murders from Sherlock Holmes stories.
64. In his twilight years, Sherlock Holmes must solve another case.
65. sequel story The Wizard of Oz Dorothy’s descendants were sent to Oz.
66. The grandchildren discover their grandmother is Dorothy from the story “The Wizard of Oz.”
67. When Dorothy is carried away by a tornado, one person in Oz is left behind.
68. The Wizard of Oz Oz is another planet.
69. An Old West gunslinger gets caught in a tornado and left behind in the land of Oz.
70. contemporary retelling Mount Tai The story follows a drifter who is found after missing for thirty years.
71. A family travels through space and crashes on a planet, leaving only the son as the survivor. He was raised by an alien race.
72. female version Mount Tai story.
73. A grandchild discovers that their outdoorsman grandpa is actually Tarzan.
74. A little girl from a broken home creates a fantasy world inspired by Alice in Wonderland– Or is this true?
75. The grandchildren discover that their grandmother is Alice in the story, and she leads them on an adventure down the rabbit hole.
76. The friends in the Rabbit Hole visit the elderly Alice. They need her help.
77. A version of the horror story where Peter Pan is a serial murderer who steals children.
78. Peter chose mortal life, he was dying and he wanted to find his way back to Neverland.
79. Peter Pan’s mother tries to find her son.
80. Pinocchio has grown up and is starting to show signs of turning back into wood.
81. This is a sequel story about teenage Pinocchio who wants to create a companion.
82. The Forty Thieves Arabian Nights The FBI is trying to track down the bank robber.
83. A grandmother with dementia claims she was a former mermaid and wants to return to her undersea home.
84. A group of contemporary kids are transported back to the 1980s.
85. A romantic comedy set in a nursing home.
86. A buddy cop movie that pairs a contemporary detective with Sherlock Holmes.
87. A buddy cop movie that pairs a contemporary detective with a grizzled old sheriff from the Wild West.
88. A buddy cop movie about a contemporary detective who teams up with a vampire.
89. A contemporary detective teams up with a character plucked from the big screen for a Buddy Cop movie.
90. A coming-of-age film set in a space colony, where a teenager wants to return to her parents’ home planet, Earth.
91. A coming-of-age film set on a future Earth where a farm boy wants to join the Space Marines and fight for the Earth in an interstellar war.
92. A woman falls in love with her robot trainer.
93. A writer falls in love with his heroine.
94. A writer falls in love with a swashbuckling leading man who comes to life.
95. A bank robbery story set in the Old West, telling the story of the first bank robbery.
96. A heist movie set on a space station.
97. GI Joe enters a fantasy world filled with dragons, orcs, wizards, knights, kings, queens and other fantasy creatures.
98. A team of warriors from different time periods must kill an alien.
99. A group of warriors from different time periods must fight against each other in a brutal time traveler’s game of death.
100. Time travelers travel through different periods and rob historical artifacts.
101. A time traveler travels back to the 2020s to operate the stock market based on information he receives from the future.

Read more: 200 Heroic and Evil Character Traits

“Phantom of Paradise” (1974)

Why should you write genre-bending screenplays?

The business of Hollywood is to make money. They do this (largely) by giving people more of what they crave: eentertainment. But that doesn’t mean Hollywood is content to follow the same blueprint over and over again. They are always looking for new trends. Why? Because there is a lot of money to be made with new trends.

This is where genre mixing comes in.

• Audiences love it because of the comfort that comes with familiar concepts, especially when they’re treated in new ways.
• Yes, Hollywood loves this because audiences love it, which leads to more tickets and streaming subscribers.

The problem with following genre trends is that you never want to write a traditional script. Hollywood is full of people like this. Therefore, in addition to creating a purely original concept (which is difficult to achieve today), screenwriters can also make use of different genres by mixing them:

• horror comedy
• comedy
• sci-fi thriller
• crime drama
• fantasy comedy

“Alien” (1979)

These hybrids allow screenwriters to differentiate themselves from the generic scripts found in the Hollywood spec market factory. They don’t reinvent the storytelling process with all new ingredients. They just combine seemingly disparate elements – like zombies and romance (yes, “zom-coms” are a thing) to create something new. Like chocolate chip cookies with caramel, people love the taste of new things and the warmth and comfort of things they love.

• Ghostbusters mix saturday night live Alumni style comedy with a twist of sci-fi horror.
• back to the future Mixing sci-fi time travel with comedy and adventure.
• alien Blending the horror of a monster movie with brilliant sci-fi scenery and technology.
• alien Added hardcore Space Marine action elements.
• Pan’s Labyrinth A wonderful blend of war drama and fantasy and horror.

What are some original genre fusions that we’ve never seen before in film and television? Have we seen romantic horror movies, space crime dramas or slapstick comedy thrillers? What type of mix can you come up with that would get you and your work noticed?

Please note: Because we all relate to the same pop culture, news headlines, and inspirations, there is no similarity whatsoever to any past, present, or future script, novel, short story, TV pilot, TV series, play, or any other creative idea The work is purely coincidental. These story writing prompts were conceived spontaneously without any research or Google searches for inspiration.

Want more ideas? Check out our other story prompts!

Ken Miyamoto has worked in the film industry for nearly two decades, most notably as a studio liaison and then as a script reader and story analyst for Sony Pictures.

As a production writer, he attended numerous studio meetings, meeting with companies such as Sony, DreamWorks, Universal Pictures, Disney and Warner Bros., as well as numerous production and management companies. He previously signed a development deal with Lionsgate and has had several writing assignments, including starring Anne Heche, Sean Patrick Flanery, Billy Zane, James Brolin, Haley ·The miniseries “Blackout” starring Duff, Brian Bloom, Eric LaSalle and Bruce Bucklina. Follow Ken on Twitter @ken电影 and Instagram @KenMovies76.