EVALUATION 1: representation in our trailer

Representation is concerned with the way that people, ideas and events are presented to us, this was a key consideration when creating our own media products as we wanted to create parallels whereby we could distort and warp normal generic representations and stereotypes by creating juxtaposing characters with their usual archetypes.

One of the representations we included was of age. In actual society, stereotypically people tend to be more in fear of youths and the danger of young people creating negative stigmatisation. As Stanley Cohen would suggest a moral panic occurs when society interacts with a particular group e.g. youths and hooligans. We wanted to subvert from this viewpoint however and morph our own ideology of fear so contrastingly wanted to create a fear around ideas and representations of the elderly rather than the young. Creating a new and authentic representation would help our film to access the cinematic industry and large scale audiences who would be intrigued by the enigma of old age actually being seemingly freighting with aspects of horror. This would fit into the uses and gratifications theory under the need for escapism and divergence from the tedious nature of everyday life. Our film diverging from reality and generic every day representations will allow audiences a sense of escapism and fit our chosen horror genre perfectly brewing a new form of fear in our audiences. Arguably, films such as the visit, the woman in black and Drag me to hell have used age representations in the past with elderly antagonists- however with the 128.5 million $ takings from the box office for woman in black for example contrasting with orphan for example using a young character as the horror antagonist making just  78.4 US $. When in the preliminary stages of our film creation the most important aspect to us rather than whether we would represent our antagonist as young or old was in fact how realistic and lifelike our film would seem in order to scare people, being our main aim in the trailer…and create harrowing enigmas audiences would feel they need to decipher. With this in mind in fact ideas of hyper reality were of more concern to us and by taking into account Jean Baudrillard’s Theory of The Hyperreal where cinematic media distorts reality we could constitute reality within our trailer. Similarly we wanted to use our magazine and poster advertising to represent the age and themes in our proposed media production to come across and realistic, and just like in the anchor-man synergy and hyperreal campaign hauling in companies and marketing devices from all different formats, our magazine cover aimed to do this with realistic photography and editing, and representation of our movie alongside actual true scary and real stories and articles making our film seem even more endearing and realistic.

The representation of our young character is whom we wanted audiences to associate with as our protagonist, and her childish attire emphasised with close up shots of her childish slippers for each other reinforce this. Also effectively with her slippers also, when paying attention to finer details relative to mise en scene- we used the ‘stompeez’ slippers that have been advertised on television and were one of the most purchased child’s Christmas gifts on the market in 2016. This representation of childishness would hence be one that many adults would be able to recognise and associate with, and our film also hence does not represent archaic themes and gothic horror with contextual medieval or old horror tale backing- instead we have created and represented a more modern genre for horrors. The young girl is also filmed mainly with warm household lighting, whereas our antagonist who is elderly is filmed mainly in the dark and shadows of our piece.

Richard dyers theory of how film representations create different outlooks of our world is also explored within our film as because the camera action is from an objective viewpoint and not prom the point of view of either characters we see everything that is happening from a non-bias perspective and audiences are enabled to make up their own minds about the events taking place. Because the setting is the old woman’s house, which is exploited through the floral wallpaper, warm dim lighting, teddies and small interior of the house- it hence creates a completely new outlook of an environment most people would deem is warm, homely and welcoming with a grandma’s house triggering connotations of friendliness, however here we have used setting to convey a juxtaposing representations. Diverting from usual collocations of the horror genre and media condes, we did not use any establishing shots of our setting as we wanted to keep this an enigma and keep audiences guessing, and also felt that by filming scenes inside the house from the very beginning it creates an idea that there is no escape, creating motifs and themes of entrapment representing and conveying some peoples worst fears- almost as if we are giving our horror a claustrophobic tone- with claustrophobia being the 7^th most common phobia in the general public.