How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The horror genre represents certain age groups through stereotypes, because it helps introducing characters to the audience in a short amount of time. Common stereotypes are used for age and gender to set up character roles, for example teenagers are seen as being irresponsible, which makes them  the ideal target for a threat. Using stereotypes to introduce characters can also add to the shock factor of the film, because women and children are often introduced as helpless and in need of protection, but sometimes they are the threat.

In our film (The Unexpected), the teenager is 18. We dicided to use this as female characters are usaully the most common feature of a horror/thriller movie. Also this stereotype is common in most horrors- for eample 'Scream 2' (click on this link to watch trailer- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U87t8x4ix0). In our movie, the teenager was dressed accordingly to here job and surroundings. She wasn't wearing smart stuff etc. But she dressed fashionably which therefore make her appear as a normal teen. You can tell that the teenager is working class as she is working for money as a baby sitter. This baby sitter job is typical for a female teenager as it is easy to do and the money isn't bad. Whereas it wouldn't make sense if there was a male character baby sitting as males are normally represented as the 'hero' or the braver of the 2 sexs.
We also included a child (Ben) who is only aged 10. We chose the child so that it strikes more fear into the audience and also to make sure that the audience knew that she was the babysitter not the mother.

Our male character, who fills the convention of horror that requires there to be a “monster”. Unlike the girl, his face wasn’t shown untill the middle of the film to build up the audience's tension. The was done by using a range of camera shots. We kept all the shots low so you could see his trousers, legs and weapon. He was dressed to suit his role by wearing boots, jeans and a jacket which seemed quiet old. Although you see this, you can't assume that he is working class, upper class etc.  This character is represented as a male for a reason, this is typical of most horrors. The killers in professional films are normal male such as Friday the 13th.

We did not take into account the ethnicity of the charaters as we wanted to go with a old character as a killer instead of a typical killer. We couldn't use ethnicity as there were only 3 characters in this film and this made it hard to add another person with a different ethnic background. So we decided to stick with just only 1 ethnic background.