Evaluation Task - 02 - How have I chosen to represent social groups in my thriller?

Our Thriller presents two social groups:

Gender

My thriller presents the stereotypical ideology of men being superior to women through having a male killer in a powerful position and a female victim in a weak position. This confirms the audience's expectation as they expect the man to have power over the woman.

This film-ideology of genders is a very widespread and common one as it has been represented by media since the invention of film-thrillers.

                Hitchcock's first thriller, The Lodger (1926), is about a male serial killer in London killing blonde and attractive women. This presentation of vulnerable female and powerful male characters has been continued through the years with other Hitchcock's classics like  Psycho (1960) and thrillers like Wes Craven's Scream (1996). Although there have some iconic strong female characters occurred in the past years - Lara Croft, Hermione Granger and most current Katniss Everdeen - there all have moments were they get physically defeated by men. Moreover almost all of them have a male supporter, who helps them in dangerous situations.

However these strong female characters are very few and the main domain of dominant and powerful characters in thrillers are male.
More current movies like  Craven's Red Eye, Nolan's The Dark Knight or Harron's American Psycho continue this presentation of gender, that Hitchcock has started in his thriller's. And the ways this ideology gets presented are often very similar. - How you can see on this pictures:

But this very strong trending representation does not come from anyway: In the past 100 years 90.7% of all proven serial killers were male and more than half of the victims were female.
Studies found out that women and men are not that different in their levels of aggression.  However women handle this aggression much more passively and less physically than  men do, who are much likelier to show their aggression in 'explosive' and very physical ways.  

 We used different low angle shots to give our killer power. This and the fact that the killer was standing represented him in a position of power over the on the ground lying and through low angle shots presented victim. This is a stereotypical representation of gender and confirms the audience's expectation as they expect to have a powerful male killer and a weak and vulnerable female victim.
This representation is reinforced by the killer obviously enjoying having power over the totally desperate victim while he is feeding her.
Moreover we wanted to reinforce the victims innocence and vulnerability through dressing her in white and rather scantily.



Alice Heappey in my thriller

    




Drew Barrymore in Scream

The most iconic representation of the male gender having power over the female. This is a perfect example of how we wanted to present gender in our thriller:

Disability
In our thriller we presented disabled persons  as being superior and in more powerful positions  than abled persons are. This could subvert the audience's expectations as they think about disabled persons like in the TV-Drama 'Breaking Bad or the film 'What's eating Gilbert Grape' disabled persons as being weak, helpless and depending on abled persons.

However we present our protagonist as a highly functioned, narcissistic psycho-path. In this term of mental disability we confirm the audience's expectations as they expect psychopaths being in powerful positions. Films like "Silence of the Lambs", "Seven Psychopaths", "Man Bites Dog".

We used low angle shots to present our mentally disabled  protagonist in a position of power. How I already mentioned did that confirm the audience expectations as they expected the killer to be powerful.

Furthermore we showed the protagonist's narcissism using shots showing him doing his hair and having the actor directly addressing the camera. While the hair shots confirm the audience's expectations as they expect the killer to be narcissistic knowing this feature from other media presentations such as "American Psycho".

Though the happily addressing to the camera subverts stereotypes breaking the theatrical "fourth wall" and bringing the audience close to the action, it clearly demonstrates the killer's mental disability through him obviously enjoying and presenting what he is doing.