Sofia and Emily Media

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Within our opening sequence we felt it was necessary to include a variety of stereotypical traits of young adults. By doing this it would mean that the audience who we are targeting our film at (15 to 25 year olds) would be able to relate to the main character.

Our opening sequence represents young teenage girls since this is what the main victim of the scene is. The character is represented as vulnerable since she is attacked by the stalker, and also walking around the streets at night by herself. She is dressed in clothes typical to what a teenage girl in the 21st century would be seen wearing. This character is fully representative of what you would think a stereotypical teen girl to look like. The fact that she is on her phone while walking down the road also relates to the stereotype of teenagers always being on their phone.

The other social group that features in our film would be adult males.Our character of the stalker is untypical of the usual type of male character you might see in a film. Usually in a horror film an adult male character might be the dad who tries to protect his family from what is happening to them in the film. An example of this type of character in a film would be Roger Perron from The Conjuring. In the film when his family are being possessed, etc he is trying to help to save as much as he can.

Typical male character from horror films. In the image you can also see how the family are cowering in the corner behind the dad showing how he is the power they look to for help and support

At the end of our film the stalker is revealed to be the detective of the town where all the teenage girls are being killed. Throughout the film the detective would be acting in the same sort of way the dad in The Conjuring does, and try to help. However, in our opening sequence it is the stalker character he is portrayed as.This shows how the stalker is obviously crazy and has a split personality, very similar to the character of Norman in Pyscho from 1960. Norman is shown to be completely normal character in the film who has to deal with his mother who keeps killing people, however at the end of the film it is revealed that Norman and his mother are actually the same person.

Even though our character of the stalker is portrayed similarly in another film, it is still very uncommon to see this type of character in a horror film being an adult male.

In this way then it can be seen that the characters in our opening sequence both do and don't represent particular social groups and how these groups are presented in films.

BY EMILY CARMICHAEL