Task 2 - How does your product represent particular social groups?

Our Media Production, which is called “Mind”, represents young people within the horror genre.In our Production we have a little blond girl who is captured by a man in a cellar. Her hands are tied together with chains and she is wearing a dirty white dress and no shoes.Therefore she represents young children and shows some kind of innocence that exists to them like in “Hide and Seek”, where Dakota Fanning is having an imaginary friend, who kills people and she can’t stop him.

She also represents the innocence and childishness of a twelve year old, which is captured in her own mind. However the interesting thing about our particular social group as young children is, that it also represents fear as in “The Others”, where a mother loses her child to a group of people, who capture children and tries to make their family members forget, that they ever existed.

Therefore we care about the child in the movie, as in our production the scene is even more horrible and terrifying because it represents the helpless young child, who is being captured and needs care because she can’t help herself.This is also due to the fact that nowadays in the newspapers we hear a lot about children being kidnapped and captured and we used this influence as a basis to lay out our production because this is a natural thing that scares the mainstream audience, because they have brothers or sisters or might even start to think about getting children.

For example the accurate example of the Pakistani boy who had been kidnapped at the age of 11 and now the family tries to get him back, but still he his hopeless in the power of the kidnappers.As well as this there are an awful lot of cases that are re-opened from children being abused, for example a girl called Laura Scheider, who had been captured by her father since the age of 6 and was raped millions of times and got 8 children. She was never allowed to leave her cellar and never actually had the experience of seeing the world. This is a terrific example of child abuse that we also show in our media product when we show the innocent, blonde girl being captured and being on her own just with the kidnapper.

However we also subverted the image of a child, as it is represented in television where a happy child usually adverts for chocolate or something similar and therefore showed the dark side to a happy child in our production. Even though our production, because of the fact that the man puts a mask over the child’s face in the end, might seem similar to “The Orphanage”, it differs a lot because we want to audience to engage with the child and feel the need to protect her, while the media product

“The Orphanage”, represents the child as something evil and uncontrollable that we have no power over. In our Media Production we also use a creepy looking guy, playing the kidnapper, who has dark eyes, is dressed in black and constantly has the same evil facial expression.

This represents the kidnapper and evil character in the genre of horror movies like it was used in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, where a man is constantly following the victim. This is also represented in “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” and therefore the audience is used to the bad guy having dark colored hair and its emotionless facial expression that we are afraid of because we can’t identify what’s behind that.

The fact that the social groups young children and the kidnapper contrast each other makes a Media Product work effectively, again shown in “Hide and Seek”, because you get engaged with the situation, again due to the fact that we are used to such stories, because we hear from them every day in our daily newspapers, television, radio and word-of-mouth.