Genre art uses spectacle to convey in images what words alone can’t. That’s baked into the premise of genre from the start. In real life we’re not going to be eaten by a zombie horde, burned by a swooping dragon, abducted by alien spacecraft, or caught up in a major musical number. Nevertheless, zombies and dragons and aliens and big song-and-dance routines that end with an entire street full of people doing jazz hands toward a crane-mounted camera help us articulate the big ideas and emotions we do experience in real life — terror and awe and rage and passion and joy — but lack the commensurate vocabulary to describe.
