Q2) How does your media product represent partucular social groups?

We chose to stick to the character conventions in horror/thrillers in that we had a tall, dark guy with a beard who looked very menacing as the killer. His beard and scruffy attire showed he was rough and not clean cut and shows he is hasn’t shaven for a while, because he is busy finding victims. He was in casual, dirty clothes, which showed that he was working class but was also in an overcoat which implied where he lived was cold. His house was a dingy and horrible place also showing his class. It had peeling wall paper and not much furniture to anchor his status, the only real possession he had was a computer, which put forth his determination as the killer more. We had him drinking whisky to show that he was potentially unstable. If we would have shown him to be drinking orange juice, for example, it would have put across a friendlier persona. If you look at other murderers such as Christian Bale’s character in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) , who is very clean shaven and smartly dressed, which anchors that he is smarter, and upper class there is a direct comparison with our main killer in regards to status and wealth. The other murderer was also tall and dressed all in black to look menacing. He is wearing a beanie which fits in with the more ‘classic’ thug/murderer appearance. He was putting knifes and other equipment into a briefcase, showing he is the more violent one and that the one on the computer is more charming.

We used a young girl who looked innocent and lived in a fairly middle class house. She looks innocent by the makeup and clothes she is wearing. Her makeup is minimal, not vulgar or garish, and her clothes are not revealing, she is wearing a knitted top (in pink) and jeans. We can see she is in a middle class house because she has a mobile phone on her bed which also has lots of pillows and looks quite lush. She had her own laptop showing she must be fairly affluent. She had a pink room showing she is girly.

When thinking about how to represent age when had to think about the actors ages. Since our audience is young adults ages between 18-25, we decided to use actors in that age range. Emma’s character would not have worked if she were older, because to seem more helpless she had to be younger.

We were also representing certain states of mind in our film. Obviously our film has a theme of suicide which needs to be approached delicately as it is a very serious matter. Films that have done this well include ‘The Virgin Suicides’ (Sofia Coppola, 1999). The suicidal girls are exploited in our film, due to their vulnerable state. Another state of mind we represent is mental illness. Perhaps not overtly apparent, but clearly the murderer has some mental issues to be murdering young girls. The way we represented this was by making the murderer seem clever and cunning, and yet sick and twisted, which are shown by his facial expressions and lines such as “yeah that comes later darling”.