Evaluation 2

How does you media product represent particular social groups?

We only have 3 characters in our opening so that narrows done how our media product as a whole represented particular social groups.

Katie- Killer. She played the role as a killer.

We decided you to make our villain/ killer a countertype of the general convention of a killer in horror. We wanted to out a feminist spin on the killer stereotype and by having a strong female who has the power to kill we feel we have target that stereotype and broken it. Katie is the opposite of the typical brunette in horror. We wanted to represent our killer as being a pretty, very  done-up young woman who is slightly twisted. But  us being amateur film makers we could get our ideal killer of the right age so we used a teenage girl but hid her face until the very end. We want her to be quite young because of our target audience 15-24, this would help the audience to keep interested in the film. It is just typical to have pretty women on television especially in horror films because the of the male audience. Like all our cast our killer is Caucasian, this wasn’t does purposely for any reason I believe it is just representative of the area we live in as it is majority a Caucasian  community and we used what actors we could. Our killer seems to be middle class this is based on her accent, she doesn’t have a strong Yorkshire accent; her clothes, she is wearing a typical salon workers uniform but she is wearing nice shoes and has nice nails and also the location, it is supposed to be her salon that is set in a middle class village in Yorkshire. By looking at this I would say she represents the middle class. Her class isn’t that obvious to the audience in our text. Katie’s nationality is obvious British from Yorkshire. A stereotype of Yorkshire is stupid, dumb. Katie doesn’t that stereotype because she is a rather successful business woman. We chose to dress Katie in as ‘Gender Neutral’ clothes as we could, plain white trousers and black high-neck top. We didn’t want Katie to be seen as a subject of the male gaze. Also looking at Judith Butlers idea that gender is ‘performativity’ that we learn to be a certain gender and things like what we wear and how we look after our selves is learned. We wanted Katie to be seen as a masculine female the countertype of the ‘scream queen’ or ‘girlie-girl’.  Katie’s sexuality hasn’t been shown to be either homo-sexual or hetero-sexual so the automatic assumption from the audience will be hetero-sexual.

Colette- female victim ‘Laurie’



Example of Sream Queen for Psycho



We want to portray Colette as a ‘scream queen’. Ideally we would of liked her to of had much more blonde hair but I think we still get her across as the ‘dumb blonde’ who is very cheerful as ditzy. Colette was also subject to the ‘male gaze’ she is pretty and gets killed off very early one and serves no real importance to the story line. Colette is playing I younger woman/old teenager. This fits with the story of a younger girl going for her leg waxed it seems realistic (verisimilitude). Again Colette is Caucasian which like a said before just represents our resources. Colette being female is very important as it shows we are not only following some of the conventions of horror but that we understand them. Colette represents and middle class maybe even upper middle class because she has an accent that is typical of and highly educated person of that class. Also when we think about her role, its normally middle class that would be going to get their legs waxed and tans especially in the economic climate. As with her other cast mates no emphasis has been put on Colette’s sexuality it is something that the audience would really notice that much during this short opening, but things such as her talking to George and maybe trying to flirt with him could signify she is hetero-sexual. We dressed Colette in a rather short dress. We made her hair wavy and down, typically this makes her seem middle class but she is wearing tights to make her look more middle class.

George- male suspect

We put a George character in the film so that the audience will think he is the killer. Obviously this isn’t the case but we only find that out right at the end of the opening. Ideally he would be an older man but we could find any available actors. We wanted an older character so we could provide more anchorage he is the killer by facial hair. Having the ‘fake killer’ with dark hair and thick eyebrows are common in horrors because blond males are normally seen as the ‘hot jocks’ from American movies I feel this idea has worked its way into horrors as well. George’s appearance as well as accent helps to re-enforce the class of all the characters. George is rude to Colette, this is slightly playing to the stereotype of Yorkshire people being rude and it could also signify to the audience that George isn’t middle class like Katie and Colette. George’s sexuality is questioned in the film because he is going to a salon and there is a stereotype of homo-sexual men going to salon. We tried to countertype this by having George dress in dark clothes have unkept hair.

We made other choices when considering representation and some choices were out of our hands for example the age of characters and having any physically disabled in our opening, were wernt able to include any because our location didn’t have wheelchair access neither did we have the resources.