How Does Your Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

What characters have you involved in your film and what social groups do they represent?

• The female character in our opening represents a young teenage girl, of the middle class. She is coming home from college when she starts getting suspicious as she is home alone but gets a feeling she’s not alone.

• The girl is relatable to many of our age group as would have experienced being home alone and walking home by themselves.

• We reject the conventions of a real films in the sense that both our characters are female. It is stereotypical to have a female character as the vulnerable victim and a male character as the strong villain. However a film this that reject this convention also, is Case 39, where both characters are female.

• However in our opening this character isn’t the protagonist, she is through out the rest of the film, as she goes on to haunt other people, which bullied her at school before her death. We can immediately see in the opening that she is the ‘villain’ of the two characters as ‘Molly’ is in typical teenage middle class clothing and ‘Victoria’ is in all black with bruised makeup on her face. We purposely made it difficult to see her face, to indicate to the audience that she had a very negative presence.

How have you constructed ideas about your character through mise en scene, camerawork, editing and sound.

• To emphasise the fact that ‘Molly’ was becoming more and more scared throughout the opening we made sure to include a variety of close ups to clearly see her face to show the audience how she is feeling.

• We always kept ‘Victoria’ hidden or only seen discretely as we didn’t want to give away too much of her character. We kept her in dark clothes and messy hair, making it difficult to make out any facial expression and keep her character mysterious .

• We used lighting to show that ‘Victoria’ had a negative presence as whenever she was about to appear there would be a bright flash of light

• We used props in the kitchen such as the kettle to show that it’s a regular occurrence that she if often home alone and is independent as turning the kettle on is the first thing she does after putting the newspaper on the side

To what extent are your character representations typical of your film’s genre?

• Our characters, in our opening were not typical of our film genre. Stereotypically the protagonists are a male and a female.

• However in our film influences, such as ‘The Ring’, they also don’t obey the typical characterisation as the two protagonists are female also. However the two characters have a larger age gap, more like a mother and daughter figure, rather than the same age like in our opening.

In what ways do your representations challenge social stereotypes?

• There is a message within our opening that ‘what goes around comes around’ this is because ‘Molly’ bullied a girl at school and was recently found dead. This is very relevant as the “the female suicide rate in England is at its highest since 2005”. As well as suicide bullying in school is also a key subject of the moment. “1.5 million young people (50%) have been bullied within the past year”. This film raises awareness to the subject of bullying and its possible, however has been portrays in a supernatural way.

• In a way the supernatural girl is a social stereotype as statistics show that people that are bullied are more likely to then go on to bully others, however in our case she ‘haunts’ people.

• Molly is a stereotypical middle class teenager walking home from college and enjoys texting her friends and drinking tea.