Author: Julian Whitmore
Tzvetan Todorov remains one of the most influential theorists of the fantastic genre. His foundational book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970) proposes a precise typology for understanding texts that hover between the uncanny and the marvelous.
For Todorov, the fantastic emerges when an event occurs that seems to defy the laws of nature, creating a moment of hesitation for both the character and the reader. This hesitation—whether the event has a rational explanation or is truly supernatural—is what defines the fantastic. If the hesitation is resolved in favor of a rational explanation, the story falls into the uncanny. If it's resolved in favor of the supernatural, it becomes the marvelous. The fantastic occupies the liminal space in between.
Todorov's approach to genre is structuralist. He focuses not on surface content (monsters, magic, etc.), but on the narrative logic and the reader’s epistemological position. His work paved the way for later theorists to examine how genre operates not just as a set of conventions, but as a structure of perception and expectation.
In the context of cinema, Todorov’s framework has been applied to films that resist easy classification—those that sustain ambiguity, where the boundary between hallucination and reality is never fully clarified. Films like The Others (2001) or Don’t Look Now (1973) often fit this mode of the fantastic.
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