Evaluation Q2

Q2. How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?


Script for Q2

PROTAGONIST (Victim) - Owen Williams (Joseph Hill)




Young, White male.

Protagonist/victim

White British

Brown/Green eyes.




Owen Williams is just minding his own business whilst going to take the elevator. He is on his way home just listening to music, quite fast and loud, wearing stereotypical teenager clothes. He has a tracksuit on, with white trainers and a white top to connote his innocence and purity. He's completely unaware of the mysterious behaviour the antagonist carries out, a stereotype of young teenage boy who's just distracted by music and games etc. Owen just thinks that she's being rude or is shy. Due to his unawareness this leads Owen to his own death or possession from the paranormal character.


ANTAGONIST (Paranormal Character) - Blair Regan (Phoebe)




Young, white female.

Antagonist/villain.

Possessed/Paranormal character.

Black hair

Dark eyes

Small




Blair Regan is the antagonist who is the more strange and paranormal character. She is very odd and not talkative. Blair Regan purposely acts like this to not reveal anything and create an unease environment. Blair purposely isolates Owen to make him useless and weak, which then allows her to pounce on her victim, to possess Owen. The black clothes, going from dress to shoes are to represent her evilness, which is also why her hair, nails and which we find out her eyes are black to. This supports her odd behaviour because it gives impression she's possessed or a very lonely and sad person.


GENDER




In my opening the antagonist is female and the protagonist is male. Generally in horror films, the males tend to be the antagonist and the females are the protagonist, therefore our characters in our opening are counter types of the roles of gender in horror films. Women are stereotypical protagonists in horror films because they are seen as naive and are generally the first victim to be killed or the victims killed throughout the film, (as seen in Scream and Halloween). However, even though our protagonist is male he still conveys the vulnerability characteristics of the victim. This has been represented through his white and cream clothing as well as the prop of headphones indicating that he's distracted and unaware making him an easy victim. Therefore, even though it counter types the usual stereotype of women being less aware, our victim still shows these qualities. Then moving on, our antagonist if female which is another counter type. However, for our sub-genre this was fine due to not having to be intimidating. But then again we portrayed the stereotypes of an antagonist by giving her black clothes so that it represented evil. The black clothes are also seen in films such as Scream and The Woman In Black. The reverse roles seen in my opening are the same as 'Unfriended' where the female is antagonist and in power and male is protagonist and vulnerable.




AGE




In my opening, both our actors are relatively young. The reason for casting a young female for the antagonist was because I've seen many horrors where they use similar ages because they are more frighting in different ways. Films which include young females are Ouija: origin of evil, The Ring and Orphan. Moving onto the protagonist, the reason to cast a young male teenager was because he can be seen as vulnerable due to being young therefore seen as weak as well as being relatively thin so not intimidating too. We also chose to cast a young male because we wanted our protagonist to be vulnerable through being distracted, therefore we could use a teenager as they have the stereotype of wearing a hoodie and listening to music. This then allowed us to use the headphones to divert his attention from unusual behaviour. An example is the film Halloween, this is because teenagers are killed throughout the film are unaware of surroundings and are too busy distracted with things such as drinking and partying, giving these teenagers the stereotype of reckless which is how they are viewed by other ages. Our characters ages are supported by the research I carried out. I created a questionnaire and got several responses which proves that young children are found more frightening in horror films.


ETHNICITY




In our opening, both our characters are British. We chose our characters to be British as we wanted to follow tradition of The Woman In Black film, with a British background however the film is set in today's date not the past. We also wanted our character to be white British as is seen this stereotype group is seen as inferior than if he was black British due to the stereotype of black British people in a tracksuit being related to gangs and violence, and we therefore went against this idea. Also, relating to my questionnaire i carried out, responses showed that the ethnicity and origin of the character does not matter as long as it suits the film.


SEXUALITY




The sexuality of the characters are not revealed in the opening, but for the plot of the film our protagonist is an heterosexual which is an archetype of horror genre as I can not pull any examples of horrors where the characters are not heterosexual. The reason for this is to portray our protagonist character as normal and generic as possible to represent him as good. Whereas, for the antagonist she does not have a sexuality when possessed because we want her to be seen as evil therefore is a counter type. This represents the idea of 'good vs. evil' seen in every horror film.


DISABILITY



In horror films, the characters are not normally disabled unless they have been made disabled by an incident. This is because the disabled are seen as inferior, weaker and vulnerable. Therefore our antagonist would 100% not be disabled as needed to portray as powerful and evil. However, mentally ill people are seen as evil which is why the antagonist in our opening is mentally ill to be a stereotype of many horror films.




TESSA PERKINS



Tessa Perkins had a theory on stereotypes that it does not always reflect reality. Our opening applies to this theory in the way that our teenager has been given the stereotype of tracksuits which is not what reality is because not every teenager wears a tracksuit. In our opening it portrays the female as superior to the male which is a counter type, this applies to this theory which that thoughts do not reflect reality shown in our opening.




HEBDIGE's THEORY


This is a theory which Hebdige believed that the media either represents the youth as 'fun' or 'trouble'. Our opening applies to this theory because our protagonist is listening to music wearing white clothes which connotes purity. So the media here has represented him as 'fun'. However, our antagonist is seen as 'trouble'. This is due to the mise-en-scene we created by giving her all black clothes to connote danger therefore has been represented as 'trouble'.




BERGER's THEORY




Berger is a theorist who believed that in media. 'men look, women appear'. This theory is very similar to Laura Mulvey's 'Male Gaze'. Our opening goes against this theory because our women is the antagonist and is not sexualised. You could possibly argue she has portrayed the 'women appear' even when being the antagonist due to be wearing high heels and a dress, however we did not cast a particular slim and sexualised actor because we did not want this effect.




STAR POWER




This is a theory created by Richard Dyer who believed that institutions use stars (celebrities) to attract a larger audience to the text. In our opening we did not cast any big celebrity actors because we felt it would make our film less meaningful. What I mean here is that it would make it less scary. For example if we used Seth Rogan as our main character it would demean the horror genre. This is because he is famous for being a comedian and starring i comedies meaning that the audience wouldn't take him seriously therefore ruining the film. This isn't just about using comedy actors, it's for all. This is because there isn't particularly well known actors used just for horror films unlike all other genre's, such as Daniel Craig for action movies and Will Ferrell for comedy films.