Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? --- Update --- Final!

In what ways does your media product use

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Ancillary Task Drafts

 These are the drafts for my 2 pieces of text for the Ancillary task, the bottom one is my poster and the top is my magazine cover. Whilst the poster remained mostly the same

Film Poster Analysis

Magazine Cover Analysis

Finished Products - Original Photos

These are the original photos/images used for my ancillary tasks, the magazine cover and the film poster.


This set of images are what we took in class for the magazine cover.

The idea was to get a photograph of the films main cast since most of us wanted that on our cover as
opposed to a frame from our trailer. Every shot apart from the top middle one was taken with the studio lights on, personally I think this yields a nicer look and definatly looks far more professional which is what you'd expect from a magazine.

However I decided to go with the image below for my magazine, I preffered the angle and "seriousness" of our faces!

The image I used for myadvertisement poster was simply a still frame from our trailer.

The image I used is around the 1:48 mark, with our antagonist, wielding the ever-so deadly pitchfork, about to plunge his weapon of choice into the rather unlucky Andy!

The Role of the Distributor

The distributor has a very specific role when it comes to films and media, get it noticed, get it out and get it recognised, and they do it a few different ways.

First off the distributor must identify the largest possible target audience for what they're distributing, otherwise they'd be marketing to the wrong people and that would only fail, or at least not work as well and they do this by developing a distribution plan and a marketing plan.

There is a lot of competition, and I mean  ALOT! With over 500 new films released every year and around half a dozen major distributors in the UK alone (Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures, Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures) each specific distributor has their work cut out for them as they've got to make their films stand out and make a profit!

The distributors have a few things they need to sort out before they can get the film out into the market. These include developing a release strategy, coming up with a release date and taking delivery of a 'master print' of their finished film. After this they have to present the film to exhibitors and negotiate various bilateral agreements to be able to show it in the cinemas, and only after this can they begin to think about marketing their film

Distribution Plan

They have to take many things into consideration when working out the target audience of a film they're tasked with marketing, including:

• Age range
• Gender
• Lifestyles
• Media consumption patterns
• Social networks they're a part of. 

With this information the distributors can make descriptions as to how and where a film is promoted, and despite having a specific target audience to aim for another factor distributors have to work with is trying to attract as many people as possible whilst still hitting the target audience.

Audiences aren't the only things the distributor have to worry about when they're creating a distribution plan... Things like:

• Competition - one example would be the films "Volcano" and "Dante's Peak", both volcano-themes disaster films released in 1997 and with such a similar target audience and plot there must have been some talk regarding making each film stand out compared to the other.
• STAR POWER! If you've got famous actors, directors, producers ect then advertise this, flaunt this! If fans of Pierce Brosnan see that a film they wouldn't normally be interested in has their favourite actor they might be tempted to take a gamble and go see it which can only be beneficial.
• Timing, I'm talking about holiday periods here. Christmas film in august? Horror in spring? Put them in December and October respectively and maybe you'll catch people in the festive mood, although I don't know many that get all excited around Halloween...
• Film certificates. It's no user marketing an 18 rated film to 10 year olds or a Uc to 20 year olds, chances are they won't be interested or even be able to get into the cinema to see it!
• Does it have a chance to get a few award nominations?
• Is the film's genre very niche or should it be marketed to a much larger audience?

Marketing Plan

With the distribution plan they also have to come up with a marketing plan which is created to raise awareness and engage interest in their product, in this case a film. There are loads of different ways in which this is accomplished, arguably, one of the best is simple "word of mouth". You can show someone posters, trailers and they may not be interested but the one thing that tips the scale could be their best friends telling them "Hey, that new Pierce Brosnan flick is good, you should go see it".

Other than this posters and trailers are the only other smaller-scale things used to promote the film. By advertising big starts (Like I mentioned earlier), creating a catchy tag-line (An example would be Jeepers Creepers 2s bone-chilling tagline, "He can taste your fear!") and making an all-round good trailer by following the conventions well the distributors can hopefully get a lot of people interested. With the fantastic new web 2.0, distributors can go further to create a buzz by not only advertising using internet pop-ups, but by using very successful viral marketing campaigns that will usually spread around the internet like wildfire!

Teaser Trailers and Theatrical Trailers... What are the differences?

Teaser trailers differ from he main teatrical trailers in mnay ways theses include:

• Length, they're often shorter by about a minute or 2.
• They give out less information related to the narrative. Theatrical trailers will often cover everything you need to know. For example, the teatrical trailer will introduce you to the chracters, plot (Bruce Willis has to infiltrate a highrise building to save his wife and stop some terrorists) and confimed release dates/age ratings whereas the teaser may not even do any of those but just do enough to spark your interest in the movie withourt relaying much information. One of my favorites is teh teaser for Christopher Nolans final entry  into his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight rises, shown below! You can see how simple it is, it doesn't give too much away yet leaves you wanting more.
• More often than not they're out way before the teatrical trailer is. In some cases they could be out even a year in advance! Of course this is all part of a clever amrketing strategy to build interest, as part of it they may release more trailers, each with different content, over that long period before the final theatrical trailer and eventually the actual movie is released.

Trailer storyboards

During the planning stage of our horror movie trailer we had to draw out some story boards listing the different scenes, shot info and other informaton including sounds/spoken parts, chronoligical order and timings as well as small pictures explaining what was written.

During pre-production and planning we had a lot of ideas that we decided to change in the end. Some, like shot number 27/28, were too hard to do so we decided to get rid of them and replace the shot with something else to save time.








Eventually we realised that our trailer past about the half-way mark was essentially a single scene, something very rare in a trailer and certainly not what we wanted to do so we mixed things up a bit. By comparing our storyboards to the trailer you may see evidence of this as some shots are in different places.

We tried to get our shots to fit as much as we could but we found the chains of our storyboard to be far too restricing so we stopped following it.
Fortunatly, since we already had most of our shots and a rough idea of where everything was going we weren't lost without the storyboard.

Off Campus Trailer

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

For my task I produced an advertisement poster, trailer and a magazine cover.

These all work together as a promotion to build hype and interest for the movie in different ways amongst my target age group of 18 to 25 year olds so that they will pay to see the movie and actually allowing the production company to earn their money. All strategies including the placement of posters, where the trailer is aired or hosted will be sorted out by the respective distributors in such a way that the promotion is actually effective and not a complete waste of time, money and resources.

By having a varied amount of marketing strategies we're able to build hype not only amongst our age group but with others. The Magazine isn't aimed at horror fans, it's aimed at those interested in special effects so that's one group of people that may not have been interested but upon reading the feature about our film in the magazine we may be able to get them to check out the on line trailer, they may also just be interested in seeing what the film has to offer in the realms of special and visual effects so the feature in the magazine would act as a sort of teaser and hopefully they might want to see what the feature is talking about. The poster as well does a similar thing. If it's up on billboards, bus stops etc loads of people will see it which further spreads interest amongst those not usually interested.

By having our trailer hosted on line anyone that's interested can simple head hope and check it out at their own convenience, share it with friends and spread word about it which can only be beneficial.

Of course our trailer would be shown in more conventional ways such as on television or before a movie at the cinema. Because of the larger costs in getting the trailer aired, we need to make sure we get our target audience to view it and not take gambles by placing it before Countdown or Teletubbies which could be a waste of money. 

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Media Evaluation: Q1

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Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

After we completed our trailer and ancillary tasks our trailer, along with everyone elses, was screened to the class so we could get feedback.

Since our target audience and the general target audience for horror is 18 to 25 year olds or young adults we felt that the feedback would be perfect as everyone in the class fits into that age range, mostly leaning towards the lower end however. 

The responses, both good and bad, are as follows:

·         Our overall story was well-received, the idea of a classic and TEENAGE SLASHER movie.

·         Whilst people liked the idea some thought the narrative was unclear, partially down to bad quality voice over (The actual sound quality that is) and confusion in the identity of the killer. Whilst some would view this as bad we were aiming for this when we were filming, our research that was done prior to filming told us people liked Psychological horror so we threw in some elements into the trailer that were meant to confuse as to who the killer actually is



The hardest part of making the gory effects work was trying to stop owen from swallowing the fake blood!

·         The special effects were praised, especially the gory effects used, however some people thought that the amount of gore and death was overkill and that whilst it looked good too many characters were killed off in the trailer leading them to feel like they needn't watch the movie as they know the fates of the characters just from watching the trailer. Despite this we felt that as a horror and particularly a teen slasher it's common knowledge that almost every character dies anyway and that they reason for our audience disliking the amount of deaths shown was more to do with the fact that the death scenes are key points in a slasher movie and that showing too many was almost like showing the Death Star being blown up in the trailer for Star Wars.

·         Many people liked the visual effects used on the trailers titles, which used a series of pre-set effects as well as some simple key-frame scaling and fades.

Jason Voorhees - An inspiration!

·         A few thought our "killer" was a good, chilling, antagonist. We opted for a more Jason Voorhees style antagonist as opposed to a ghost or paranormal force which was what we had originally planned to use. Whilst I believe there is a thin line between scary and non-scary when it comes to showing and familiarising the audience with a slasher movie killer I think we got it right by literally keeping our killer in the dark for most shots where he is present. In fact it was suggested that one shot, a close up of his face, should be darker because he is too visible. 

·         People enjoyed the soundtrack choice which was composed from small audio clips we made in Garageband and a series of royalty-free music tracks and sound effects found online. The beginning of the trailer uses some slow paced, eerie music to help build tension and when we get near the end and what I like to call the "Montage of death" the music turns into a fuller sounding piece where not only the texture is built up but also the tempo is. Not only did this help us with the pacing throughout the trailer which our audience mostly thought worked well  but the final piece had a few sharp notes played on string instruments and we took advantage of this by syncing up some of our clips, for example our character Dave running through a doorway and slamming the door behind him, to those notes which both us and our audience feel worked well.



This scene was praised well, it even got a few scares!

·       The ending to our trailer where our killer grabs our character Charlie from behind her car seat seemed to work well, not only was it mentioned frequently in our feedback but during our screening it even managed to make a few people jump which was exactly the response we were hoping for!

In conclusion I feel that with our audience feedback our trailer was generally enjoyed. Whilst there are parts we could improve and we will most certainly do, the trailer was shown to employ good use of both horror conventions and trailer conventions and we believe that this is what led most people to enjoy it.

Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the contruction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

During the various stages of creating our trailer both myself and my group used a whole host of technolgies to help us. This is an overview of what we used, how, where and why we used it!

YouTube-

YouTube was definitely invaluable technology that has proved useful on more occasions than one.

During my research stage I used YouTube's library of videos to gain access to various horror movie trailers that I analysed to get a feel for not only the conventions of a trailer but those of horror.

The fact that YouTube is so accessible is another matter of its own, providing I had internet access I could look up a trailer at any point allowing my to do my research not only at college but on the go and at home whereas if I was perhaps limited to the colleges resources the work  I could do outside would be severely limited.

During the planning and construction stages my group and I were able to use YouTube to access more trailers and organise what conventions and styles we would follow and use in our own trailer.

After completion we were able to access our own trailers since they were uploaded to YouTube which is helping with evaluation I am currently writing.

Feedback is another point, YouTube uses a comments system so I was able to share my video with friends and they could share feedback via the comments system that I could use in my evaluation.

Blogger-

Blogger is a very popular and easy to use blogging website. Everything I do is saved on to blogger and that includes my research and planning. Similar to YouTube I was able to use blogger to access various pieces of information mainly relating to planning and research at home and even finish up and edit pieces of work that.

Because of the digital medium I was able to use various techniques to make my blog look pleasing to the eye. I was able to edit background to make it interesting and slightly more fitting (I used a picture of Freddy Krueger and a slightly more "horrific" title font!) as well as change colours and font sizes of the texts to make certain important points stand out more as well as making it look generally nice and not boring like your typical black and white piece of text would be.

Like YouTube as well Blogger features a comment system, my teacher was able to review and share feedback on my work over term holidays and weekends. I was able to access Blogger and take note of these points and make amendments to my work without even being in class which was very useful if I wished to do work outside college.

Photoshop-

With some prior experience I found Photoshop to be a brilliant piece of technology that helped a lot when designing my ancillary task pieces.

Both my Trailer poster and Magazine cover were created in Photoshop and all make full use of its built in tools such as the Liquefy tool, the ability to create layers and change contrast/brightness.

Final Cut Pro-

When editing out trailer we used Final Cut Pro, industry standard software that certainly lives up to its reputation. Final Cut features not only what you'd expect with a customizable layout, an in-depth timeline that allows for precise and complex editing but It also features many amazing effects including various transitions, the ability to alter brightness, colour and contrast and add specific effects to text.

Like with Photoshop I had some previous editing experience but with a program called Sony Vegas, one that is very different and nowhere near as complex and as in-depth as Final Cut Pro so naturally there were difficulties adapting to and learning the new software and working out how to make the most out of it but once myself and my group were over the hurdles Final Cut Prop allowed us to make a very professional looking trailer that we're happy with.

Garageband-

This is a piece of software I've never used before, mainly because I personally dislike using Mac operating systems.

Garageband provided the majority of sound effects used including various booms and musical cues. I do feel however the program was rather simple and lacked the customisation within the sound that being a music technology student I'm used to when creating sound effects or soundtracks.

Cameras-

During the production of my trailer we utilised HD video camera that recorded at a very high quality 1080p.

With the tripod I felt that whilst taking the helm and recording some of our shots I had adequate control over angle, camera height and positioning ect.

Again I had some experience, albeit not much, with video recording so some things came naturally and other things were down to trial and error such as filming a piece of the trailer in a specific angle to see if it would work and then obviously go back and re-do it if it didn't look good.

By the end of our series of shooting sessions I felt I knew a lot more and could comfortably film this all over again with just myself operating the camera.

Flickr-

Flickr is a website that allows people to upload, annotate and share images through other mediums including Blogger and that's exactly what I used Flickr for.

Livetype-

Another program I haven't used before, Live type was what we used to make the titles as well as our main film title. We used a pre-set font called "Cracked" and edited it by warping and stretching parts of the letters to make it look "scarier". The freedom to do whatever we liked was great and allowed us to make some fantastic looking titles and surprisingly, unlike Final Cut Pro, the software was very user friendly.

Freesound.org-

Freesound is a website that hosts royalty-free sound clips. After a fair while spent browsing through its various sounds we were able to find some that we were able to use in our horror trailer, like the squelch at the end when our killer plunges the pitchfork  into a rather unlucky victim.

Freesound has a very good and vast library of sound, and whilst we only found a few we wanted to use there were hundreds of others that were worth using if we needed them.

Magazine Cover final product

Poster final product

Audience Research

Before we, my group, could even begin thinking about camera shots or filming locations we needed to do some rather extensive research to find out if what we were doing would essentially sell in a real world situation. Thankfully this isn't a real world situation and billions of dollars aren't on the line but none-the-less we were treating it as if it were so the research had to be done.

Our primary method of research was a single survey. It had a list of questions, 10 in total, that we felt gave us exactly what we needed to know what people want to see in our trailer. The survey was hosted on a website called Surveymonkey, we were able to draw up said survey and share links to friends, family and others online so they could easily and swiftly respond. Currently, the survey has had 34 responses and considering the small scale and budget we have, I'd personally consider that to be good.

Taking not only the quantitative information but the qualitative I have devised a series of charts showing our results and I will proceed to explain what the results meant for us and why the questions were there in the first place.

Question 1:

Question 1 was simply age, our research has shown that a whopping 73.5% of respondents were aged 16-20 which gives us solid info that our target audience compose of those in their late teens and early twenties.

Question 2:

Call it the second part to question 1 if you like as it gives us further information about our target audience, specifically gender. It was revealed that more males responded than females and seeing as I asked that only people with an interest of horror respond to this survey, we have pretty conclusive results that back up the idea that the core target audience for horror is males in their late teens and early twenties.

Question 3:

The 3rd question relates to sub-genres of horror. The question gave a brief list and an "other" option and asking that respondents select 2 categories at maximum that they prefer. The "winner" here isn't as clear as the previous questions, in descending order, the top 3 genres were Psychological, Zombie then Sci-fi. Ghost/paranormal followed suit being the 4th most popular, but the others on the list, including the more specific answers under the "other" category were too small of a percentage to take into serious consideration. We eventually decided to go with a Ghost/paranormal themed movie with some Psychological elements as it not only fit with our personally choice and after all, there has to be some artistic freedom but it would have some appeal to the wider audience of horror.

Question 4:

Like 1 and 2, this question was rather simple. Do you like Gore? 73.5% said yes, the rest said no. Based on this we decided to not go overboard and turn this film into a Hostel 3 but include some scenes in the trailer that involved gore, Andy's death scene for example which shows a pitchfork being plunged into his throat.

Question 5:

This question what somewhat more complicated, it was entirely based on the respondents opinion and was much less of a closed question. We asked if there were any particular motifs or themes that they either liked in a horror movie or that scared them. 2 particular things that cropped up often were clowns and ghosts. We decided to go with the whole ghost idea over clowns, mainly due to personal preference but other things that were mentioned including the monster "lurking in the shadows", shots using mirrors and plot twists we decided to utilise in our trailer.

Question 6:

Again, another straightforward question. Do you prefer CCTV or hand-held camerawork compared to other types?

We had 3 categories to choose from, yes, no and both. Whilst there were very few yes answers, the winner was in fact both with 55.9% of the votes so we decided to ditch the idea of having the film almost entirely handheld and CCTV based and instead just utilise these shot types for a hand full of shots for particular effect.

Question 7:

Question 7 asked what the respondents favourite horror movies were. Whilst there wasn't a really obvious specific movie that lots of people liked, movies of the slasher genre usually cropped up and with something else in their answer otherwise it wouldn't make sense that slasher didn't top out list in question 3.

Question 8:

Another broad question, we gave the respondents 5 different categories, Setting, Plot, Characters,  Special Effects and Other, and asked them to say what features of the films they listed above they liked.

In the answers for the "Setting" category there was a distinct repetition of the idea of being somewhere ordinary where anything abnormal happening would be strange and unexpected. Hence, we set our movie or trailer at someones house.

the answers for the plot category were much harder to derive a conclusive answer to what people like in a horror movie plot as the answers were all over the place. One person liked the religious themes in their movie and someone else liked the idea of an unstoppable enemy. Eventually we banded together and added smaller elements of the plots mentioned to advance and develop our own plot.

The Character section had a rather obvious answer that stood out like a sore thumb. Normal People. People seemed to enjoy the fact that the characters in these movies weren't Superman or Blade but instead your average Joe and this was elaborated by some to teenagers and charactersyou felt genuine hate for.

The special effects category had yet another distinct answer, realistic gore but very little else. This fit in great with not only our original idea but our budget, we don't exactly have thousands to spend on an advanced motion capture suit.

And finally, the Other category. Honestly, not much was in here just a reiteration of normal people being the focus.

Overall, asking people to further elaborate on their favourite movies in question 7 gave us a a better understanding of what it was about Scream or The Hills Have Eyes that people liked instead of just saying "They answered Scream, we'll make this a slasher" we can say "We don't have to make it a slasher, but they liked the teenage victim aspect of Scream so lets add that".

Question 9:

For this question we decided that we needed more information about the antagonist, so we simply asked if people preferred a more human or beast-like monster/villain. Human was by far the premiered answer here with 69.7% of the votes so naturally, we went with a humanoid ghost as our antagonist.

Question 10:

Location, location, location. We asked what people preferred as their horror setting. We gave a standard list of horror settings and an other category but the clear winners were "Abandoned Environments", "Urban (Cities Etc)" and "Houses".

My Own Horror Movie Idea

Over a half term, we were tasked with coming up with an idea for our very own horror movie.

Whilst these were presented in class, the idea I presented was met with some criticism and afterwards I choose to scrap the idea and revert back to my initial idea which I had written up in its entirety before choosing the idea that I would eventually scrap.

Epiphany

The film starts with Senior Detective Annette Addison of the NYPD, a 37 year old woman from Kansas who was brought up in a religious household, although not religious herself, investigating the suspicious death of her husband, Matt. The files stated that his colleague Danny tampered with his harness before Matt was sent up to clean the windows of a high-rise building giving him no support when he tripped and fell off the suspended platform,  but after a brief interview, Annette is convinced by Danny that he didn’t do anything yet her Chief sends her home for a few days to come to terms with Matt’s death claiming that her emotions and feelings towards Danny, who has been a friend of her and Matt for years, are getting in the way with the investigation.

After researching similar suspicious deaths and returning to work she heads down to the morgue to further examine Matt’s body. Dr Navajo assures Annette that nothing is up, and that the injuries are consistent. He also goes on to say that the situation reminds him of old stories his grandfather, who was a very spiritual man of Native American decent, told him. Years ago, during a tribesman’s life he would have an epiphany and realise his time on this earth was at an end, and so he didn’t anger the ancient spirits he would sacrifice himself to pass into the afterlife peacefully. But those that protested these epiphanies would be killed by the spirits in circumstances that would appear as accidents to most people and those that became suspicious of foul play on the spirits behalf would be killed in a similar fashion so they would not spread word and rally against the spirits.

Annette initially shrugs the idea off, and upon leaving she finds that Danny’s case was closed and he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life, but the van that was transporting him to prison was involved in a car crash, sparing the driver and the guard’s lives but killing Danny, a fire then breaks out in the morgue killing Dr Navajo supposedly caused by faulty wiring.

Annette is then involved a series of near-death accidents, barely surviving she comes to terms with what is happening and whilst none of her colleagues will believe her she is adamant the legend Dr Navajo told her shortly before his death is in fact true, and that she has stumbled upon a secret shrouded in mystery and disbelief for years. 

Annette is then faced with a choice, she could fight whatever is trying to kill her and if it is a supernatural entity, bring it to justice. She could also end this now, kill herself, and protect everyone from a seemingly unstoppable force...

Gender Representation in Horror

Gender Representation in Horror

Some would argue that Horror represents genre in ways somewhat more progressive than other genres, or the media in general. There are a fair few arguments towards this, one is in the form of a book written by Carol Clover called Men Women and Chainsaws, which I will discuss later on, but I’ll begin by taking a look at how Genre, and women in particular are represented in general media.

For some time the media has represented women rather conservatively, almost mirroring how women are represented in our society. There was a time where it would’ve be unusual to see women out of the house and working, research gathered in 1992 show us that on screen women are outnumbered by men 2:1, males were more likely to be shown out of the house, working and having authority as well, see what I meant about how media has mirrored society?

This research has proven that when it comes to how women are represented in the media, visibility is an issue. Before we can try to improve and better the conservative representation we’re almost knocked back by the fact that women don’t have as much screen time as men, but that aside, there are other matters that have been brought to light, particularly about what roles women play.

In 1983, Jeremy Tunstall write a book called The Media in Britain, in which he took a look at various reports and research and came to a conclusion about how we portray women in the media in the form of categories. He goes on to say that there are 4 different categories in which we can place women in typical media by looking at what characteristics in their character are emphasised.

The categories are:

·         Domestic, the stay at home woman.

·         Sexual, when a woman is viewed as a sex object.

·         Consumer, shown to be avid shoppers or the target for advertisements/products.

·         Familiar, when referred to as the wife of or mother of rather than as themselves.

I’ve tried to do this by watching a television soap, and said to myself to bear in mind these results were published in 1983 and I might have difficulty placing women on screen, but the sad fact is that I didn’t. Almost every woman on screen could be categorised, if we are progressing it’s clearly not with the general media.

There is however, some advancement of progressing representation in horror, and to start off I’m going to look at John Carpenters Slasher Flick, Halloween (1978).

So, in relation to the 4 types of women outlined above, can we put the women of Halloween into the categories? First off we have Judith, she is represented as a sex object as she is topless, shown having sex and seen from a POV shot, and is also referred to as the sister of Michael Myers also placing her under the Familiar category. Annie, Linda and Laurie all follow the stereotypes too, Laurie to a lesser extent but I’ll get to that later. Annie and Linda are both sexual, one of which has sex during the film and the other intends to, and Annie is shown to be the daughter of the town sheriff an equally as prominent character in the film so is Familial just like Judith. So far we haven’t progressed much, the girls still follow the stereotypes but is this the case for other Horror films?

The Shining (1982) only really has one prominent female character, Wendy. First off she is referred to as the wife of Jack and mother of Danny; she is later shown to be submissive, weak and almost loyal to Jack and despite wearing more masculine clothes and doing Jack’s more “Manly” work for him she fits into the categories, mainly in the Familial and Domestic sections.

In the same movie, we have snippets of sexual representation with the woman in the bathtub, she is seen by us in a POV from Jack’s perspective completely naked, and attractive to Jack and due to the POV, to us.

Eden Lake (2008) has characters that fit into some of the roles, the protagonist Jenny fits into the Domestic role as her job as a nursery teacher is almost the same as a nanny or child career, she’s also referred to as the girlfriend and would-be fiancé of Steve, she is also seen as sexual during a scene where antagonist Brett ‘pervs’ on her wearing a bikini through a pair of binoculars but we can almost disregard that due to the context it is in. The mothers of the children are clearly shown in a Familial role, they’re names are never mentioned and are only referred to as a wife or mother.

The only other prominent female character is one of the gang members, Paige, she is shown somewhat tomboyish, slightly sexual during the beach scene but rather passive and submissive as well as she takes orders from Brett to video them torturing Steve and Jenny but has no part in the actual torture.

The categories aren’t the only way women are represented, I briefly touched on how women were viewed technically in a sexual role, and this can be elaborated to further mention how camera work and various types of shots can objectify women as sexual, and the use of this is known as the “Male Gaze”.

During some films, when women are to be objectified in a sexual way various camera techniques are used. For example a POV from a male perspective where the camera may tilt up and down the woman’s body as if we were eyeing her up, and in some shots parts of her body would be segmented for example only showing her legs encourage us to look at her as a nice pair of legs, rather than another character.

Examples can be seen in both Halloween and The Shining. In Halloween Judith and Linda are seen from POV shots so we identify with the male character looking at them (Strangely this is the murderer, Michael, which prompts the question, does Michael view these women in the same sexual light?) as is the woman in the bath tub in The Shining.

Luckily not all female characters are objectified like this, there are 4 in particular, 3 of which follow the same theme of Carol Clover’s “Final Girl” mentioned nin Men Women and Chainsaws. Laurie, Wendy and Jenny are depicted as finals girls for a number of reasons. All of them are there for the audience to relate to rather than objectify, unlike her unfortunate friends, Laurie is far from sexual, has a more masculine name and even has physical masculine features, because of this she is an androgynous character.

Wendy and Jenny are both somewhat different as they’re not very androgynous, both have femining names, look and dress more feminine (Jenny at least, Wendy is often seen in work overalls) but what they do have in common with Laurie is the fact that they survive. The whole point of the final girl is having a female character as the protagonist that the audience can relate too, and we can’t relate to them if they’re offed 30 minutes into the film. For the most part all three survive and over-come the antagonist, we can somewhat ignore the fact that Jenny dies at the end of Eden Lake as this is so far on in the film.

Other than the final girl the only other non-objectified female character would be the bath-tub woman in The Shining. Whilst she is objectified to start off with she turns into a corpse, complete with horrible wounds and hag-like features, which undermine the initial objectification.

Having the final girl means a lot in media, Horror is unlike many other genres because it has a female character as a point of identification rather than your typical action hero like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, although other genres have touched on the idea, such as Sigourney Weaver playing female protagonist Ripley and your typical kick-ass woman in Alien (1979).

With that aside we can finish with the narrative and the issues the narrative contains regarding representation of women. First off, we have the simple idea of sex = death. In Halloween Judith, Annie and Linda are seemingly punished for having sex or wanting to have sex, could this be a punishment for simply not being aware of Michael’s presence or to punish women for breaking rules? If so, it is a very conservative idea.

Staying on the theme of deaths, In Halloween the majority of characters that die are women, whereas The Shining has an equal number of deaths between men and women and the reaper seems to favour men over women and Eden Lake, I find it particularly odd that the film to popularize the final girl does in fact have some seriously conservative idea, although director John Carpenter has said himself that Laurie was spared because she wasn’t focused on having sex and because aware of Michael which implies Annie and Linda were killed because they were focused on sex.

In conclusion, the Horror genre defiantly seems to have the right ideas when it comes to progressive and less sexist representation of women. Whilst it will take time to completely get rid of the conservative ideas such as sexual objectification (Which I personally believe will still be around for many years unfortunately) we’re certainly on the right track, and like I said at the start media does seem to be mirroring our society as women are getting out of the house, having occupations especially those with power such as being in the police service or being a politician.

I’m genuinely interested in where we go with this, and in 20 or so years, comparing how the media represents women compared to now would certainly be fascinating.