Evaluation - Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

When planning our opening sequence, me and my group discussed casting and who would be most appropriate to play certain roles within our film. We prioritised casting our antagonist as the killer plays a vital role in our film opening. It also meant that we could develop a back story for our antagonist and fit the plot and the other characters around this. Initially, we thought about following conventions of the horror genre by casting a male as the antagonist. This is typical of many horror films as they are traditionally thought to be more powerful and dominating. However,I realised that many of the horror films I have watched and found interesting had a female antagonist. We then decided to challenge this convention and inverted the typical female stereotype. As a group, we chose Kayleigh to play the role of our antagonist as she enjoys acting. She also owns appropriate clothing for the role and has dark hair, further connoting the darkness of her character's personality.

The antagonist of Orphan (2009) is a seemingly young girl named Esther. She appears very innocent, wearing her hair in lace bows. However, she also dresses in very dark colours - something atypical of a girl her age. This creates the impression that something is not quite right and suggests a darkness in her personality. Upon first thoughts, you would assume there is nothing unusual due to the every day clothing (despite the unusually dark colour palette). This sense of false security something I wanted to replicate in my film opening.

Esther is a powerful character who steadily instils fear into all of those around her. Orphan is one of the few films that challenge the traditional view of men being strong and holding all of the power. This is something I would like to incorporate into our film opening as I believe it makes for a far more interesting plot, thus making the film more memorable.

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Next, we decided to cast Ellie as the victim in our film opening. Upon research, I found that it is most typical for the victim to be stereotypically feminine and vulnerable. We decided to follow this convention to make it very obvious who the victim will be from the outset of our film opening. Ellie also owned suitable clothing for this character.

                             

                                               

The protagonist ("Nina") of Black Swan (2010) also follows the same brief of being feminine and innocent, which is why my group used her as a template for our own character. Nina wears lots of white, further connoting her innocence, which inspired us to do the same for Ellie's character.

    

Our two characters are very different and casting them both as females presents a contrasting representation of women. It is uncommon for a woman to be portrayed as the callous killer that is our antagonist, but we have challenged this norm to make for a more interesting film opening. We followed the convention of portraying women as weak to show diversity. In conclusion, I believe we have represented a social group in a very interesting way that will make our film opening stand out. We have challenged and complied with the horror genre conventions to not only represent the vulnerable side that is expected of women, but also to showcase their underestimated dominance.