How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Hayley Townend

Age & GenderI our film we support stereotypes towards teenage girls as we show them as being argumentative and falling out with each other, which is what people normally expect teenage girls to do.During the credits of our opening scene we use mise-en-scene to represent the three girls are all getting ready by doing their hair, makeup and getting dressed - which is following the stereotype of girls always caring a lot about how they look.

Age & GenderAlso the main teenage girl character “Penelope” is tall, skinny and blonde and at first is portrayed as the nasty one of the friendship group, Like in the film “Mean Girls”. This is supporting the stereotype of what young popular girl are shown to be as, they are also seen as to be dumb.She is also wearing clothes that are seen as to be in fashion/expensive, which again would follow the stereotype of her being unpleasant.

Age, Gender & SexuallityAnother stereotype about teenagers is that they are seen as always partying and staying out late, which is exactly what happens in the opening of our film and is how the dilemma is caused. We’ve represented the sexuallity of these girls to be straight, as the argument in the opening scene is them all arguing over a boy that they liked.We have done this to show that we are representing the girls to be like what you’d expect “normal” girls to be.

Age & GenderThe villain “Carlisle” in our film, supported stereotypes as he was a middle-aged man who had a disturbed/possessed look to him. The audio for when he was on screen was a sinister type of music, which built up tension whenever he was on the scene. This then also helped show the villain as being dangerous. also the fact that he’s a lot older than the teenage girls he could be seen as more threatening to the vulnerable these girls, as he could be seen to have more power. This is like in the ‘Saw’ films, as the villain in there in considerably older than his victims.

Age & GenderWere also supporting stereotypes with the teenage characters mother, Normally parents are shown as being protective towards their children and sticking up for them, which is what we have represented our mother character to be like. She also could come across as firm.

Supporting Stereotypes

We have followed the usual stereotypes of a typical horror film as we wanted to focus more on the films storyline, therefore, we thought is was easier to portray the characters like this as we only had 2 minutes the het the point of our film across.