Evaluate your representation of specific social groups in your piece.

Representation of Women

• Our piece seems to focus on the relationship between the sisters and their mother, and shows mainly a representation of females as it is an all-female cast in the first two minutes. Two of our characters are young girls and there is also a mother. 

• Young people/children usually fit well into our genre as they are vulnerable and suit the victim roll well. However they are also rebellious and mischievous, putting them in dangerous situations as they are stereotyped as bad listeners and curious, which gets them into trouble. So one factor that has affected our representation is genre conventions and the needs of the narrative.

The children in 'The woman in Black' are seen as innocent

 until they are possessed.

The characters in our film play as sisters who are close, yet also mischievous

• These representations are usually shown in children's film such as Cinderella, where there is a evil mother and an innocent child. 
  

The evil stepmother in Disney's 'Cinderella' creates 

a negative view of mothers as she is sly and horrid

The evil mother in our film is also sneaky as we can see 

from her eerie laugh at the end of the sequence

• We reinforced the stereotype of an evil stepmother by making her cook an unusual brew, making her seem more mysterious and frightening as the audience does not know what is cooking in the pot.

The unusual stew that the mum makes adds to her scary persona

• Theory surrounding representation in thrillers mainly focuses females and young people, and is therefore relevant to our film. Lacey suggests women, and especially teenage girls are often victims in films. This is because society is trying to take revenge on them as a disruptive influence. 

Sidney Prescott plays the innocent female teen role in scream

• Lacey goes on to also suggest scary films tap into deep-rooted social fears. The role of the ‘evil stepmother’ is already a common fairy-tale stereotype that people have from childhood. All the roles played by characters in our film links back to Lacey’s theories. For example, women are the victim in our films. The two sisters are afraid of their mother, and what she might do to them. And a mother that turns on her children is socially more unacceptable and frightening than other villains.

• I believe our victim stereotype works because girls are seen as more of an easy target, and are seen to be more vulnerable than boys in media terms. This positions the audience to feel sympathetic towards the girls, building a relationship between them. Also teenage girls are stereotyped to be very superficial about their looks, and through media repetition they are often perceived to be very curious. This could show that society is going against them as they are a disruptive unwanted influence

• Young females are presented in different ways in psychological thrillers. They are usually vulnerable and an easy target, and are usually the people who die or get killed first. This is because they are seen to be irrelevant, and of not much use to anybody. 

• This is a negative representation as the women are usually killed off without even being given the chance to show themselves to the audience and also the fact that they are considered irrelevant to the plot. This is also reinforced as the protagonists of psychological thrillers are usually male, as they are seen to be more macho and strong whereas women are portrayed as the weaker sex. There are no men in our sequence allowing the women to make an impact on the audience
.

In 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' the women are killed off first as they are weak and give in

•   Another representation of young women in psychological thrillers is that they’re deserving of their torture/death. Most of the girls victimise and bully the killer or villain first. They are shown to be rude and arrogant, and belittle the future killer almost making it reasonable for them to be killed as they deserve it. This is also a negative representation of young women and I do not feel we have used this strerotypical representation. Although the girls are curious, they are likebale characters who do not deserve to be terrorised.

Summary

• We do use female stereotypes - the evil mother and the princesses who need to be saved (Propp)
• We do this to create the narrative set up we need to get the audience interested in our film.
• The representation of the girls is sympathetic and mainly positive
• The representation of the mother is ambiguous at this stage and becomes negative alter in the film. We do not think this is a damaging representation as the whole reason this stereotype works for thrillers is because it reverses the convention of mothers being loving and caring. The reversal in a thriller actually tends to reinforce this main stereotype.