The document discusses the main character, Gary, featured in the opening sequence. Gary fits into the social group of a family man and father figure. He is portrayed as the dominant person in the nuclear family who works and provides for his wife and children. However, the character also has a dark and psychopathic side. While Gary follows some stereotypes as the male villain, he also subverts expectations by being a family man rather than a typical thriller villain. The representation of Gary as both good and bad challenges audience perceptions of characters and their Binary Opposites theory that people can only be understood as purely good or bad.

1. EVALUATION QUESTION TWO:
WHAT DIFFERENT SOCIAL
GROUPS FEATURED IN YOUR
OPENING SEQUENCE?

2. Throughout the process of creating my opening sequence, choosing a target
audience was important to knowing what sort of characters and types of
people I was going to create in my opening sequence. As I chose a target
audience of young adults to middle aged adults, mostly male, I wanted to
create my characters as someone of which the audience can possibly relate
to in some way and create a hyperreality around this normality distorting
the audience perception of what is expected throughout everyday life.
This is seen within my main character ‘Gary’ who fits within a social group of a
farther figure and befits within the typical nuclear family of the farther being
the breadwinner. He is seen as a family man that looks after his family and
is the parent that has a good job that supports his family, he is seen to be
the dominant person within the family and controls most aspects of it and I
have tried to display this within my opening sequence. Although I have
created a dark side to his character, and this although possibly not so
relatable as the farther figure is, it is a dark personality that possibly
audiences could of seen within farther figures. Men are normally seen to be
villains within films such as Propp’s theory where he stated that every film
is expected to have certain characters and one of them being the villain. His
theory was based around fairy tales and within fairy tales such as Snow
White, although the main villain within this was a female witch, men were
sent out to hunt down Snow White and to kill her as they were seen as more
cable of this then a woman would have been and this is seen a lot within
fairy tales.

5. Overall I think that my representation of the male psychopath is rather stereotypical, as
this character is conveyed a lot within other thrillers and this character can be
developed in interesting ways which helps to separate and make the thrillers diverse
from each other. Films such as Silence of the Lambs, Saw and the two examples I
have given above all display character that are strong dominant males and go into a
destruction of psychopathic ways yet they are all done in different way. The
character of Gary is very much so stereotypical of what a psychopathic killer could
potentially be like mainly that he is male is the main factor that makes him a
stereotypical character. Although in some ways he is an anti-stereotype as through
my research of thriller films a lot of the villains do not start out being the farther
within a family and so I think that I have gone against typical stereotypes slightly
here by making it more of a shock that a family man could go so crazy. My
representation of this character is most likely going to have a negative effect, as an
audience they expect the man of the family to be dominant and caring and therefore
not capable of going crazy and having psychopathic tendencies. Through the idea of
the Hypodermic Needle Theory media have create the main male character within
films to be the hero and be the dominant males that protect others, and this idea
therefore has been created as a possible expectation within society. As my film is
aimed at possibly these types of men and wives/children that know a man like that in
their life, then this is going to have a negative effect as it questions if this is just a
mediated expectation that the media have created, and if in fact male figures live up
to these expectations because of the media. Furthermore supporting this idea,
Strauss’s Binary Opposites theory creates the idea that as an audience we can only
understand what’s good when something bad is there to prove this. And therefore
this idea of one individual person being good and bad at the same time questions
this theory and possibly the audiences perception of if they think that individual
person is good or bad themselves. Through my audience feedback they believed that
the character of Gary is yet to be fully developed as it only an opening sequence and
I chose not to give too much away as to follow the conventions of one. Although they
did notice that he was slightly becoming confused and seeing things that he
shouldn’t and this made them question his mental state and what he is capable of.
Through the support of spooky titles and the dark lighting throughout they chose to
be more worried about what he was capable of rather than feel sorry for him. I feel
this was a positive response to the opening sequence and this showed that I had
achieved the effect I wanted, rather than feeling sorry for the character Gary, that his
family has gone missing, instead I wanted the audience to fear him and this was
seen in the audience feedback that I received.