Evaluation Activity Task 2

How is your media product represent particular social groups?

How is our Film opening used to represent social groups.

Teenagers and young adults are usually represented as Naive,reckless and quite unintelligent in horror films. For example in Nightmare on Elm street the teenagers where always seeking for danger instead of avoiding it for example they would follow the sound of the villains voice and they would keep everything a secret from adult figures like their parents in the films . In every single film of the nightmare on Elm street series the teenagers would always be involved in sexual activities.That is also usually when they would be killed by the Antagonist is usually right in the middle of them having or sex or right before or after. This would suggest to the audience that antagonists would usually target the reckless teenagers who are immoral.

Another example of a cliché representation of teenagers is seen in "It follows" which is one of the films which influenced us in making "INHABITANT" the teenagers in "it follows" are represented as reckless and dumb as the main character has sex with multiple people and they make stupid decisions like towards the end when they plan to take lots of electronic devices to a swimming pool and plug them in so that they can chuck it in the swimming pool when the antagonist jumps in the pool to attack the victim who is the main character. How ever there plan was very dangerous and risky and it ends up back firing and almost causing the main character to die. The girls in "it follows are also veru sexualised with their costumes being revealing as the main character is always wearing a swimming costume or she is seen in her famous sexy pink lingerie.
However in INHABITANT our two main characters who are two young adult girls. They are represented in ways which challenge but also conform to the general stereotype of Teenagers in horror movies.


"Lisa" is portrayed as fairly sensible due to her modest clothing and unpacking all the boxes whilst shown to encourage her partner Ellie to do so also. Lisa's clothing is very modest and casual, this subverts from the stereotype of girls being over sexualised in horror movies as her behaviour is seen as acceptable as her character is sensible and not the stereotypical "dumb", she is therefore challenging the usual representation of women.
However, Ellie is portrayed as quite silly and immature as she films and mocks her girlfriend "Lisa" whilst also shown to be flirting slightly. This conforms to the stereotype of teenagers being irresponsible and acting as sex symbols. Ellie's character also seems to lack common sense as she lingers in the attic despite the lights somehow turning off. The common sense would be to exit the attic, however she is shown to shout for Lisa, supposing it was her, and using her phone to guide the way. She is then attacked in the attic and as the audience we hear her falling dropping the camera and also screaming, this demonstrates Ellie as a vulnerable character. We chose to do this as it is conventional for horror films as girls are usually portrayed as vulnerable as there are many significant shots of girls running away and falling down with high angle shots so that the girls look vulnerable. Ellie conforms to the general stereotype of girls being victimized in horror films, we had the character Ellie pan the camera upwards in a low angle shot to reveal the supernatural being so that the ghostly figure looks overpowering and intimidating also creating the representation of vulnerable and weak for Ellie.