The 7 Types of Intertextuality in Film
From Tarantino’s martial arts homages to the fairy tales Shrek pulls apart, films borrow from other works all the time. The name for it is intertextuality, and it comes in seven main types. Each type below gets a plain definition and one famous film that shows it at work. For a longer list of films, see our 25+ intertextuality examples in movies.
TL;DR: how many types of intertextuality are there?
Intertextuality is when a film borrows from another work and expects you to notice. This guide sorts it into seven types of intertextuality: allusion, parody, pastiche, direct quotation, genre, adaptation and structure. Each borrows something different, from one costume to a whole plot. Literary theory counts three or five types, covered in the FAQ.
What is intertextuality?
Intertextuality is how a film borrows from other films, books, myths and pop culture, and counts on you to recognize the source. It ranges from a two-second Easter egg to a full adaptation.
The term started in literary theory in the 1960s. Film borrowed it because movies borrow constantly. The seven types below sort those borrowings by what gets taken: a detail, a tone, a style, the exact words, a genre’s rules, a whole story or a story’s shape.
1) Allusion
Allusion is a reference the film never explains, and Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is the textbook case. It works through a costume, a line of dialogue or the look of a shot. Viewers who catch it get an extra layer. Viewers who miss it lose nothing. For more films that do this, see our allusion examples in movies.
Example: Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) referencing Game of Death (1978)
- Box Office: $180.9 million worldwide
- Awards: Golden Globe nomination for Uma Thurman
The Bride’s yellow tracksuit with its black stripe copies the one Bruce Lee wears in Game of Death. Tarantino never mentions Lee. The costume does the talking.
The nods keep coming. The film opens with the ShawScope logo of the Shaw Brothers, the Hong Kong studio behind a generation of kung fu films. The swordsmith Hattori Hanzo is played by Sonny Chiba, who played a ninja of the same name on Japanese television in the 1980s. You can enjoy the film without spotting any of it. That is what makes it allusion.
2) Parody
Parody copies a familiar work to make fun of it, and Shrek does it to the Disney fairy tale. It only works if you know the source, because the joke lives in the gap between the original and the copy.
Example: Shrek (2001) referencing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
- Box Office: $487.9 million worldwide
- Awards: First Academy Award for Best Animated Feature
In Snow White, the Evil Queen asks her magic mirror who is fairest of them all. In Shrek, Lord Farquaad asks the same mirror which princess he should marry, and the mirror answers like the host of a TV dating show, presenting three bachelorettes: Cinderella, Snow White and Fiona.
The rest of the film keeps swinging. Duloc greets visitors with a singing booth that sends up a theme park welcome. The seven dwarfs set Snow White’s glass coffin down on Shrek’s table. None of it lands unless you grew up on the originals. For the studio feud behind those jokes, see our answer to is Shrek Disney.
3) Pastiche
Pastiche imitates a style out of admiration rather than mockery, and The Matrix is a pastiche of Hong Kong action films and Japanese anime. It borrows the look, tone or technique of another creator or era and builds something new with it.
Example: The Matrix (1999) borrowing from Hong Kong action films and anime
- Box Office: $463.5 million worldwide
- Awards: Four Academy Awards including Visual Effects and Film Editing
The Matrix wears its influences openly. Producer Joel Silver said the Wachowskis pitched it by showing him an anime and saying they wanted to do that for real. They hired Yuen Woo-ping, a Hong Kong fight choreographer, and put the cast through months of wire-fu training before filming.
Bullet time, the effect built from a ring of still cameras fired in sequence, turns the frozen moments of anime into live action. The green tint over every scene inside the Matrix echoes the green text of early computer monitors. Lewis Carroll runs underneath it all: Neo follows the white rabbit, and Morpheus offers to show him how deep the rabbit hole goes. Those are allusions laid over a pastiche. Types stack.
4) Direct quotation
Direct quotation lifts a line, shot or clip word for word, and Toy Story 2 does it when Zurg tells Buzz, “No, Buzz. I am your father.” Unlike allusion, it is explicit: footage, a recreated shot or dialogue taken straight from the source. The skill is in the new context, which changes what the old words mean.
Example: Toy Story 2 (1999) quoting The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
- Box Office: $511.4 million worldwide
- Awards: Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy
The scene plays out on top of an elevator in Al’s Toy Barn. A second Buzz Lightyear accuses Zurg of killing his father, and Zurg answers with Darth Vader’s line from The Empire Strikes Back, one name added. Buzz howls “No!” the way Luke does.
The quote lands because the audience already knows the original. Dropped into a toy store, Vader’s reveal turns from tragedy into a joke. The words are old. The meaning is new.
5) Genre intertextuality
Genre intertextuality plays with the rules of one or more genres, and The Hunger Games (2012) welds a survival thriller to reality TV. A film can subvert what a genre leads you to expect, mix two genres, or comment on a genre’s habits out loud.
Example: The Hunger Games (2012) echoing The Most Dangerous Game (1924)
- Box Office: $694.4 million worldwide
- Awards: Multiple People’s Choice Awards and Teen Choice Awards
Suzanne Collins has said the idea came from channel surfing. On one channel she saw contestants on a reality show. On the next, footage of the invasion of Iraq. The two began to blur. She also named the Greek myth of Theseus and the gladiator games of Rome.
Gary Ross’s film carries that blur onto the screen. The arena fights play as a survival thriller, shot close and handheld. Then the film cuts to the Gamemakers’ control room and to Caesar Flickerman’s commentary, the grammar of reality TV. The hunted-human plot has roots in Richard Connell’s 1924 story The Most Dangerous Game. The Hunger Games takes that old genre and asks who is watching.
6) Adaptation
Adaptation carries a story from one medium into another, and Finding Nemo sits at the loose end of it: it borrows the shape of Homer’s Odyssey, not its text. Successful adaptations balance fidelity to the source with what only cinema can do.
Example: Finding Nemo (2003) referencing Homer’s Odyssey
- Box Office: $940.3 million worldwide
- Awards: Academy Award for Best Animated Feature
Marlin crosses the ocean to find his son, the way Odysseus crosses the sea to get home to his. Along the way he meets a monster in the deep, a band of sharks who swear they have given up eating fish, and a current that carries him most of the way. Pixar never billed it as an adaptation. The shape is borrowed, not the story.
A true adaptation keeps the source’s characters and plot and moves them into a new form. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) turns Odysseus into Ulysses Everett McGill and Penelope into Penny, and keeps the Cyclops and the Sirens, even though the Coen brothers said neither of them had read the poem. Both films borrow from the same poem. Only one is an adaptation.
7) Structural intertextuality
Structural intertextuality borrows the shape of an older story and fills it with new material, and The Lion King takes its frame from Bambi and its plot from Hamlet. It can be obvious or subtle, depending on how closely the new film follows its source.
Example: The Lion King (1994) referencing Bambi (1942)
- Box Office: $968.5 million worldwide
- Awards: Two Academy Awards: Best Original Score and Best Original Song
The Lion King began as a pitch described as Bambi in Africa, with lions. The finished film keeps that frame. A newborn prince is shown to a gathering of animals, loses a parent and grows up to take his father’s place. Both films build to a fire near the end.
Hamlet supplies the plot on top of that frame. An uncle kills the king and takes the throne. The dead king appears to his son and tells him to remember who he is. The son returns to set things right. Michael Eisner, Disney’s chief executive, asked for something more Shakespearean, and the story team found Hamlet already in it.
The wildebeest stampede shows how the studio built the scale. Animators designed a few wildebeest in 3D software, multiplied them into hundreds and shaded them to match the hand-drawn characters. Five animators and technicians spent more than two years on two and a half minutes of film.
When the types stack up
The types of intertextuality combine, and Shrek’s send-up of The Matrix is the neatest case: a parody of a pastiche.
Princess Fiona fights off Monsieur Hood’s Merry Men, freezes mid-air while the camera circles her, then carries on. That is The Matrix’s bullet time, borrowed for a laugh. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) goes the other way, a pastiche that mixes several comic book art styles in one frame, each hero drawn in the style of their own comic.
More questions about the types of intertextuality
What do obligatory, optional and accidental intertextuality mean?
They sort intertextuality a second way, by how much the audience needs to know. Obligatory intertextuality needs the source to make sense: Spaceballs (1987) barely works without Star Wars. Optional intertextuality adds a layer you can miss, like the Game of Death tracksuit in Kill Bill. Accidental intertextuality is a link the viewer brings that the filmmaker never planned, such as a book or a song a scene happens to remind you of.
What are Genette’s five types of transtextuality?
The French critic Gérard Genette sorted the ways texts relate into five types in Palimpsests (1982). Intertextuality: one text present inside another, as quotation or allusion. Paratextuality: the material around a work, which for a film means the title, poster and trailer. Metatextuality: commentary, such as a review or a video essay. Hypertextuality: a new work built on an older one, which covers parody, pastiche and adaptation. Architextuality: the genre a work signals it belongs to. All seven film types in this guide fit under three of his headings: intertextuality, hypertextuality and architextuality.
Who coined the term intertextuality?
The Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva coined it in the late 1960s, building on the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that every text is in dialogue with others. Her line that any text is “a mosaic of quotations” is still the shortest definition going. Film studies took the term up later, and it suits cinema, because films quote images and sounds as well as words.
Is an homage a type of intertextuality?
Yes. Homage is the film industry’s word for a respectful reference. A single nod, like the ShawScope logo at the start of Kill Bill, is allusion. A whole borrowed style, like the Hong Kong fight scenes in The Matrix, is pastiche. What separates homage from parody is intent: homage honors the source, parody laughs at it.
The Final Cut on the types of intertextuality
Once you can name the seven types of intertextuality, films start talking to each other. Kill Bill talks to Bruce Lee, Shrek talks back to Disney, and The Lion King talks to Bambi and Shakespeare at once. Rewatch any film on this page and count the types. Most of them use more than one.
For more films to test yourself on, go to our intertextuality examples in movies. For the craft terms, see the glossary of filmmaking terms.
Jay Neill
Jay Neill is the founder and managing editor of iFILMthings and believes everyone should have access to the film resources they need to plan their filmmaking project, which is why he’s dedicated iFILMthings to helping all filmmakers.