Evaluation Q2: Emily Bland

It is important to look at representation to understand how certain characters should be portrayed to the audience of your horror film. For our film we have looked at different extracts of films and have seen that the majority of victims have been represented by young females to appeal to a male audience.

From this clip of the ring you can see that the female, Rachael, is the victim. this is evident through her posture and clothing. She is a single mum and has been portrayed as a weak woman in this scene as she is wearing casual baggy clothing and isn't bothered about her presentation. This is the typical stereotype for a single parent, they are made to seem as though they cannot cope on their own and so seem in need of help. mostly close-ups and midshots have been used when focusing on Rachael in order to see the pain and worry that she is feeling making her seem much more vulnerable.

(4.47-8.10mins)

In this clip from The Messengers the main victim is a female, some high angle shots have been used to portray her as a weak and vulnerable character which is how females are normally portrayed. The tight fitting clothes show that she is quite feminine and gives the impression that she may not be able to handle herself in the situation that she is in. The fact that the victims family does not believe that strange things keep happening to her make her even more of a vulnerable character as she is purely alone with what is happening.

We used a fairly small female to play our ghost as through research we have found that the majority of ghosts have been young small girls. This can be seen in films such as 'The Ring' and 'The Grudge'.

We have chosen to use a childrens environment to film our horror film as the creepiest locations in films tend to be them associated with children. The reason for this is that children are not supposed to die therefore those places are normally fairly eerie.

From looking at the audience research sheets we have used characters between the ages of 16-17 as these were the ages of the majority of the characters in the ghost films we had watched. We also have a white cast as the most of the films had predominately white casts. 

(5.10-5.27mins)

In this clip from the grudge they have used a young female as the victim as younger people tend to believe more in supernatural things. We didn't use a young female, however at young male still has a similar effect as a young life is being taken away by a ghost. We chose to challenge the stereotypical 'damsel in distress' character by using a male actor so the the target audience (mainly males) would be able to relate more to the character and his feelings.

I produced a Wordle to display the feedback we got for how successful our content was for our target audience. You can see that we had positive feedback therefore we have been successful in achieving the appropriate content.