The document summarizes the representation of social groups in a student-produced horror film opening. It discusses the representation of gender, with the main character being female which goes against genre conventions. It also discusses the representation of age, with the main character being a young girl to make her more relatable to their target younger audience. Finally, it briefly discusses that the film did not explore representations of ethnicity, class, sexuality or disability since the character and setting did not call for those explorations and remained focused on the plot.

1. Evaluation Question 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?

2. Gender Representation
• There is only one main character throughout our film opening – the protagonist who is also revealed to
be the antagonist at the end of the film. The main character in our film is female.
• Stereotypically females are presented as being the victim in horror films, and a male character usually
plays the antagonist (for example, Ghostface in Scream and Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm
Street). At the start of our own film, the main character seems to be the victim of an unknown
antagonist, although it is revealed that she is in fact the antagonist at the end of the film, defying this
particular horror genre convention. On the other hand, it could be argued that she could be an overall
victim throughout her film due to her own mental health.
• We went against using the male gaze in our film – a theory based on how the audience views the
characters in our film, focussing predominantly on how men look at women, how women look at
themselves, and how women look at other women. The character is shown wearing loose clothing
(pyjamas) throughout the film, and due to her young age, using the male gaze and therefore
sexualising the appearance of the character would be inappropriate as well as irrelevant in our film.

3. Representation of Age
• Although I am 16 years of age, I played the role of the young girl in our film whose age is not revealed
in our opening sequence. We defied the common use of adult characters in horror films which are
usually aimed at an audience aged 15 and above. However, we had previously concluded that the
primary target audience of our film was people aged 12 and upwards during the research process of
our task. Therefore, we had decided to present the main character being of a similar age as they would
be more relatable to this younger audience – this would evoke a sense of sympathy towards the
character being a victim in our film. She is shown as being naïve when going down the stairs as she
brings no source of protection with her
• Characters of a young age or who are children are commonly underrepresented in the horror genre as
being the protagonist, and are usually cast as being the antagonist in this particular genre of film. The
role of a child being the demonic figure in horror films has been increasingly popular over the years,
becoming a reoccurring convention in Hollywood horror films. Early examples of children who play the
antagonistic role in horror films include Regan MacNeil from 1973’s The Exorcist, and more recently
Milo from Sinister 2 released in 2015. Production companies usually cast children in horror films as
being the face of innocence within the context of the storyline, deceiving the audience by resulting in
the child being the complete opposite (of innocence).
• In our own production, we deceived the audience in our plot twist - by revealing the antagonist as
being the same character as the protagonist. This dark reveal contrasts with the previous innocent
identity possessed by the main character.

4. Representation of Ethnicity, Class, Sexuality
and Disability/Physicality
• We did not explore ethnic representation and different ethnic groups when making our product due to
the main character in our film being white British. There were no other characters and therefore we
had no ethnic difference throughout our film. We focused more on the plot of our film rather than on
presenting different cultures. Due to the fact that the setting of our scene was inside a house rather
than outside (for example on a street), we were unable to feature any background characters in our
film which could have potentially been of a different ethnicity to our main character.
• Our audience can assume that the main character is of a working to middle class based on the setting
of the house that she is in. We did not focus on presenting the character as being of a certain class in
particular as we were more focused on the presentation of our storyline.
• We did not research sexual or physical representation when producing our film as they are both
irrelevant to our narrative; the main character is able bodied and therefore representation of disability
was not something we had to include in our film, and due to the character being young in age,
sexualising her appearance would have been inappropriate as well as unnecessary in our films plot. We
did not need to represent the sexuality of the character as there were no other characters present in
our film.