Genre remains one of the most powerful tools in storytelling. It offers structure, clarity, and emotional direction. For filmmakers, it helps shape narrative choices. For audiences, it signals what kind of experience to expect. Yet in Nollywood, genre is often misunderstood or misused. As a result, many films feel overcrowded, tonally inconsistent, or forgettable.

The Power of Genre in Storytelling

Across creative industries—film, literature, music, and games—storytellers rely on genre to shape their work. Genres help audiences choose whether they want to feel thrilled, moved, amused, or challenged. They are not rigid rules but flexible frameworks defined by tone, structure, themes, and style. As storytelling evolves, genres also adapt. They guide creative choices, influence marketing strategies, and shape how audiences interpret stories.

Globally, genres are well established. Audiences recognize action, comedy, drama, fantasy, horror, romance, sci-fi, and historical fiction. In non-fiction, categories like biography, documentary, and true crime have also taken shape. Many stories combine genres—The Hunger Games blends dystopia, romance, and action; Get Out mixes horror with social commentary. These hybrid forms make storytelling richer and more dynamic.

Understanding Genre Conventions

Genre conventions are the familiar elements that define a genre and make it recognizable. These include narrative patterns—like a romantic comedy’s meet-cute and happy ending or a thriller’s rising tension and climactic twist. Character archetypes also help define genres: the hero and villain in action films, or the beautiful girl and monster in horror. Settings and visuals matter too—sci-fi often uses futuristic backdrops, while crime dramas favor gritty, musty and urban environments. Themes like love and fate in romance, or fear and survival in horror, reinforce a genre’s identity. Specific color schemes that make each unique; for instance, black and blue tones for crime drama and dusty brown and neutral for stories that go back in time.

Tone and pacing also shape genres. Horror should feel unsettling; comedy should be light-hearted; drama should be emotionally intense. Action films move fast with frequent high-energy scenes, while mysteries unravel slowly, dropping clues along the way. These conventions allow audiences to anticipate a film’s emotional and narrative arc.

Nollywood’s Troubled Relationship with Genre

Nollywood has struggled to apply genre with consistency. Filmmakers and even audiences often misunderstand or overlook genre distinctions. This results in films that drift in tone or try to be too many things at once. A romantic comedy might suddenly shift into a violent thriller. A horror film may become unintentionally comedic, depending too much on jump scares and sound effects. Some films marketed as action end up featuring more romance and drama, with little or no action at all. These inconsistencies weaken emotional engagement.

Nollywood action movies have suffered these inconsistencies. A closer examination of action film conventions reveals that many Nigerian films classified as action are, in fact, better described as crime dramas. And this is because they barely follow the genre conventions of action.

Ms Kanyin, produced by Nemsia Studios, aims to tap into the horror genre with a modern Nigerian setting. However, despite its atmospheric setup and cultural potential, the film falls short of effectively delivering on core horror expectations. A horror film must keep viewers unsettled — Ms Kanyin gives us moments of intrigue but rarely a sense of sustained danger. Effective horror — especially supernatural horror — works best when its world follows internal logic. However, we don’t get a clear understanding of what the threat is, what it wants, or how it operates. Ms Kanyin lacks deeply developed characters that the audience can root for or fear for. Good horror relies on tight pacing and tone control — viewers must feel like they’re on a ride. Ms Kanyin often feels unsure of what ride it’s offering

Kemi Adetiba’s To Kill A Monkey opened with a compelling cybercrime setup but soon drifted from its genre foundation. The early scenes captured the usual internet fraud elements—ritual undertones, reckless spending, and the shady, den-like setting. But the story failed to show Efe (William Benson) and Oboz (Bucci Franklin) executing the AI-driven scam they constantly discussed. This scam eventually caused their downfall, yet we never saw it in action. Showing the fraud in progress would have reinforced the cybercrime theme the series claimed to explore.

Overused Tropes and Safe Bets

Romantic comedies like Isoken and The Wedding Party, succeeded by sticking to familiar beats and cultural themes. However, this overreliance discourages experimentation. Many filmmakers combine multiple genres to appeal to everyone, resulting in bloated, confusing narratives. Audiences sometimes expect this chaos, viewing more restrained genre films as dull. This has normalized genre confusion rather than challenged it.

At the heart of this problem is a lack of genre literacy. Many Nigerian filmmakers and investors don’t fully understand how genre conventions work. They default to mixing styles without clarity or purpose. As Nollywood gains global attention, the industry must evolve. International platforms expect genre clarity, not chaotic storytelling.

Award Bodies and Misclassification

Even award shows reflect Nollywood’s genre confusion. At the 2020 AMVCA, Living in Bondage: Breaking Free won Best Drama. Though it includes dramatic moments, its core is a supernatural thriller rooted in occultism, spiritual warfare, and suspense. Misclassifying it as drama overlooked key genre elements—rituals, nightmares, and supernatural tension. This blurred the lines between drama and horror-thriller and highlighted the industry’s habit of choosing genre labels based on emotion rather than structure.

This matters because it sidelines underrepresented genres like horror, thriller, and sci-fi. When award bodies ignore genre accuracy, they also limit the recognition and growth of genre-specific storytelling. It also complicates marketing and distribution, both locally and globally.

Exploring the Blood Money Genre

The Blood Money genre in Nollywood is a very dominant and frequently explored area. It blends spiritual horror, crime, and moral caution. Typically, it is a a subgenre of the thriller and horror genre. These stories typically involve characters seeking wealth through occult means, including human sacrifice. This genre explores themes of greed, desperation, betrayal, and spiritual consequences. The narrative usually follows a character drawn into a cult who gains riches but suffers mental torment or tragic ending.

Foundational titles include Chico Ejiro’s Blood Money (1997) and Teco Benson’s Rituals (1997). And then the era of Ramsey Nouah’s Living in Bondage: Breaking Free (2019) modernized the genre with a thriller twist in 2019. More recently, Juju Stories, The Blood Covenant and Ile Owo, explored blood money themes using secret societies and political corruption. This genre specifically highlights a major aspect of Nigerian storytelling, which latches on to real occurrences.

Global Implications of Genre Confusion

Nollywood’s unclear approach to genre seems to affects its global reception. In international markets, genre serves as a shared language that guides how films are positioned, sold, and distributed. Film festivals, streamers, and critics rely on genre categories to select and promote films. Without clear genre framing, Nigerian films may struggle to fit into global programming slots like horror nights, sci-fi festivals, or action showcases.

This ambiguity also impacts marketing. Global distributors may need clear genre signals to predict audience interest. If a thriller randomly shifts into comedy or a romance veers into spiritual horror without context, international viewers may feel misled. This reinforces stereotypes about Nollywood being unstructured, which undermines its potential despite rich storytelling traditions.

Hope from New Voices

Signs of change are emerging. During a Filmhouse press briefing for the launch of KAVA, a new streaming platform, Inkblot founder Chinaza Onuzo acknowledged the need for better genre representation. He encouraged filmmakers to explore genre types specific to Nigerian experiences. This marks an important step toward industry reform.

Unconventional voices like CJ Obasi (Mami Wata) and Arie Esiri, and Chuko Esiri (Eyimofe) are already pushing boundaries. Obasi’s Mami Wata embraced fantasy and folklore with visual confidence, earning recognition at Sundance. It anchors on the fantasy thriller genre and successfully delivers so. The film draws directly from the myth of Mami Wata, a powerful West African water spirit often associated with beauty, mysticism, and danger. It doesn’t just reference folklore—it embeds it into the world of the village, Iyi, where spiritualism governs life. The villagers’ worship and fear of Mami Wata sets a mythical tone from the beginning, grounding the film in magical realism.

The film’s central conflict—between tradition and modern rebellion—creates a slow-burning suspense. When external forces disrupt the village, the tension rises. The threat isn’t just physical, but existential and spiritual. Its costumes, as well as the black and white cinematography also aid the storyline. Its language choice and sounds also do justice to its ancient backdrop in which it is set.

However, a kin look at its brief cinematic run in 2023 shows that it didn’t enjoy vast profit. It also further strengthens the fact that times movies that do justice to their genre markings don’t enjoy favorable reception at the cinemas.

Eyimofe thrives on realism. It shows life as it is—no gloss, no melodrama. The film focuses on ordinary people: Mofe, an electrician, and Rosa, a hairdresser. It follows their daily struggles—debt, grief, bureaucracy, unreliable systems—without sensationalizing them. These are problems many viewers can relate to or recognize, especially in Nigeria and across the Global South.

A Way Forward: The Genre Guidebook

Nollywood doesn’t need to copy Hollywood. It needs a deeper understanding of genre rooted in Nigerian realities. What does Nigerian sci-fi look like? What would a legal thriller sound like in Lagos? How can horror reflect our cultural fears? These are the questions a robust film culture must ask.

Creating a standardised genre guidebook is a crucial first step. It should define key and hybrid genres, give local examples, and outline storytelling principles. Marketing teams must align promotional materials with the actual genre to manage expectations. Finally, the industry should encourage collaboration between veteran and emerging filmmakers, balancing tradition with experimentation.

Genre is more than a label—it’s a storytelling tool that connects creators to audiences and markets. For Nollywood to thrive globally and culturally, it must stop treating genre as an afterthought. It’s time to take genre seriously and create a guidebook built on Nigerian stories, for Nigerian storytellers, and global recognition.