Evaluation Task 2: How does your product represent particular social groups?

We chose to have two characters in our opening,a white male and a white blonde female.

The Blonde Female:
We have chosen to make her a ditsy character, which is fitting with the stereotype of blondes. Her desk is covered with trashy magazines and bright pink stickynotes. This creates a negative representation of female workers who actually have serious jobs. She plays with her hair constantly using it to flirt with the male. She wears a tight short black skirt with a fitted pale pink top. We can assume that most offices around the country will have the fit office girl that everyone fancies. We have drawn on this and heightened it for the purpose of our film. We have stuck with the idea of the stupid blonde dying first, like in a lot of horror/thriller films nowadays.

A classic example is Drew Barrymore in the opening of Scream.

We see our female negatively at the beginning because she is annoying and persistant. As the audience we want to side with the male because he is keeping to himself and trying to 'work'. Once we hear what he is saying in his head, we flip to seeing her positively because she is so unaware of what is going to happen to her.


The White Male:

We have chosen to have an attractive white male as our killer. Unlike the ditsy blonde he is a hard worker and it is clear that he got his job becuase he's smart, not because of his looks. He is clean shaven and wears nice clothes, which is what will attract the female audience. What makes our killer scary is the fact that he is so normal and polite on the outside, but on the inside he is thinking messed up things. It's much more disconcerting knowing that your everyday 'girl or guy next door' could have a stash of bodies in their basement, than a killer that looks different. For example, Dexer uses an attractive male who works at a normal police job fighting crime. They subvert this stereotype of a crazed killer by using his attractive looks and job as a cover. This is what we tried to do.
However films such as Scream, use a killer that obviously looks dangerous. Somehow this sits better with us because we can see the danger head on, and we don't see his face.

Therefore we have subverted the stereotype, just like Dexter and American Psycho, that killers have to look different. Because really, in our world you don't know what a killer looks like - they could be your work collegue.