How does you media product represent particular social groups?

The opening of our film shows a young female adult, who plays the main protagonist in our film. The opening shows her kneeled down by a gravestone, looking quite upset. The whole film opening follows her, with different camera movements to create the effect that she is being followed by her best friend her died a few weeks early, however the audience are unaware of this at the time. We decided to use a female character in her late teens as we though that is the time when people socialize and like to go out with friends, so by loosing a friend around that age would have a greater effect on the protagonist. We have used female characters as we think they are used as a stereotype in horror/thriller films. In films such as ‘Silence of the lambs, Scream and The eye, all the main protagonists in these films are female, who are the ones that get chased, are haunted and are the ones the antagonist are after.

In these thriller films, a male character is usually portrayed as the antagonist, however we have gone against this stereotype and decided to use a female ghost as our antagonist. Our film doesn’t exactly portray a particular group of people; it just looks into dept. at friendship, and the whole ‘friends forever thought’ as our two characters have been friends for nearly the whole of their life, and now one has died, yet they carry on following and trying to make contact with our protagonist which scares her and isn’t always in a nice way. Our film shows a negative representation of ‘ghosts’ as the ghost in our film is set out to contact our protagonist but in a evil way, and wants to scare her and make her suffer.

We have used another female character in her late teens as our ghost as she is then the same age as the protagonist and show the connection between the two. We looked at different ghosts from films, and thought the young girl ghost from ‘The ring’ would be suitable to compare and make our Female ghost have a look of. With the dark colored hair coming down in front of the face to make it look quite creepy.