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

My product represents two particular groups. The first being young girls. The young girl in my film is represented as a victim who has been kidnapped and is suffering from abuse. Other films which have a child victim include, ‘The Orphanage’ which our idea was originally based around. ‘The Others’ which deals with children within a big country house and Hide and Seek’ which is about a father and daughter who move to the country, when the child makes an imaginary friend she starts behaving strangely. These three films deal with issues about children which we have tried to cover within our film which represents some lives of young children who are victims of abuse today. For example Baby P, who was a victim of abuse in which social services failed to pick up on. We were influenced by this in our desire to represent young people.

The second social group which my product represents is men with serious mental heath problems in his 20’s. The man within my film is represented as a psychopath. Psychopath men also feature in ‘Friday 13th’ in which the psychopathic man tortures and murders people in gruesome ways. In Psycho’ there is a man who is mentally insane who believe that he is his mother and. He attracts people to his hotel and dressed up as his mother and kills people. Psychopaths are not a demographic because there is not way of quantifying who is a psychopath until they are caught for their crimes. We tried to portray this in our own film where we used a man dressed in normal clothes who appeared as normal as possible. This is because there is no definitive way of representing a psychopath.

In the newspapers at the moment there is a convicted child killer called Jon Venables. He was only a child himself when he tortured and killed a young boy. In another article, a man called Peter Chapman raped and murdered a teenager. Both these articles link to my media product as we deal with the issue of abuse to young children. The men are demonised for the acts which they have committed which are horrendous crimes. In another case, a young boy has been kidnapped. This relates to my media product in the way that in my film, a young girl has been kidnapped. The Madeline McCann case is another example of a child being kidnapped which also relates to my media product. The newspapers made a moral panic out of these acts and they have prominently been featured in newspapers for many months. In our product, we tried to make drama out of the kidnapping as this is a common feature in horror films. As I have seen so much information about the McCanns and Jamie Bulger case in the newspapers I was influenced by this in deciding how to represent the social group of children in my film. Children are represented as innocent victims in the press and this is how were wanted to represent the young girl in our product. However, as I have seen the killer of Jamie Bulger was a child himself so this isn’t always the case and the media make a moral panic out of this and created a folk devil out of the horror film 'Child’s Play'.