Evaluation - Question 2

How does your Media product represent social groups?

Within our product, there are two groups of people: The girls and the zombies.
They are both dressed in relatively little clothes for the cold weather around them. This was sexual stereotyping on our part, as wearing little clothes makes women look like victims and they have little to protect their body from nakedness and so they appear more helpless in the face of the mass of zombies. The behaviour of the girls was typical of women in zombie films. They ran aimlessly with no plan, until one was cornered and the other killed. This is teasing for the audience, as it is a kind of “cat and mouse” chase, which builds suspense and increases the enjoyment of the film.

These girls were stereotypes of the helpless woman in zombie films. They are blonde, which suggests innocence that the zombies many violate if the girls are caught. We used the stereotype of the girls because it heightens the scariness of the zombies, and the amount of damage they could do if they caught the girls. The point of view shots from the zombies, which were shaky added more to the effect of the women being clumsy and scared. We also shot the girls from high angles, to make them appear smaller, weaker and less powerful than the zombies.

We could have challenged the representation of women in our product by making one or both of the characters powerful and able to stand up to the zombies. This has been used in a few zombie films, most notably Alice from the Resident Evil film series However, this would not be good for our product, as it is important that the girls are powerless compared to the zombies so the suspense is great during the chase sequence.

The zombies are portrayed as a mass, which helps to make the audience more sympathetic towards the girls. This is because having an individual against a mass is always uneven odds, and scary when they are being pursued. The zombies are in the same age group as the girls, this is because the transformation in zombies took place at house party, where the two girls were the only survivors, all this is found out later in the film. This adds a new dimension, as the girls are actually being pursued and attacked by their old friends, showing a total loss of humanity and descent into animalism.