How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

In our film opening, there is a total of 6 characters; 5 victims and one killer. All of the characters in our film are in the age range of 16-17 and male so we have only represented two social groups; teenagers and the male gender. The main representation we have put across of these social groups is that they are a very vulnerable, as shown by the 5 murders on the 16-17 year old males. This does tie in with mainstream Media’s representation of teenagers. If our representation of teens is compared with a show like the walking dead for example, the character of Carl (a teenager) is constantly helped and told what to do by his father, showing that teenagers are viewed as vulnerable as they need to be constantly aided as they are unable to look after themselves. This is similar to our film opening as the victims are unable to look after and defend themselves in the absence of an adult and are murdered. However, the murderer played by Ashley is an opposition of the Medias stereotype of teens. Usually in the slasher sub-genre, the killer will be tall, strong and dressed in scruffy, dirty clothes like Jason from the Friday the 13th films. Our murderer is a well dressed and fairly short teenager. This is a complete contradiction to the stereotypical murderer and also shows that teenagers are capable of looking after themselves to a certain extent. The fact the murderer is dressed in neat clothes and cares about his appearance is also challenging the normal view that teenagers are sloppy and untidy.

The image on the left is from our film opening and the image on the right is from the horror film ‘TEXT’. The two characters are both teenagers and dressed in a casual manner. The character from TEXT is not like some other representations of teenagers which would often be scruffy. He is casually dressed, but also is well kept and neat. We have represented our teenage characters in the same way as the teenagers in our film opening with them being dressed in their usual clothes, which aren’t scruffy or sloppy like some stereotypes may suggest.