How does your product represent particular social groups?

All actors in our film are young people. Because we had constraints on who we could use for our actors there wasn’t a lot of choice. In the end it was a good choice to not get any older actors from out of school. Using teenagers would be ideal for what our target audience would be (15-24). The fact it is horror makes it leave an impression on the audience that they are not safe from a certain person or group because of their age, some thing they cannot control, making it more threatening. Many films have done this and tried to use this tactic on audiences to scare them both during the film and after it. Films that do this very well are Saw and Hostel. Saw features mainly young people, although they are often older than teenagers, in their late 20’s. These people are targeted because the protagonist “Jigsaw” believes he is punishing them for doing badly in life, and giving them a reason to live and appreciate life more in cruel and grotesque ways. Hostel, set in Holland, features the victimisation of young American university students on holiday in Amsterdam, also possibly because of their age being seen as more of a weak spot as opposed to a threat. The victims in our film were young people, much like those of these two films. We wanted to make a sense of fear and panic that people felt they had no control over like the victims in Saw or the backpackers in Hostel. They were taken somewhere strange and unknown for a reason not known to them or the audience before coming to a painful and horrible fate. This is what we aimed for in our film, by showing the protagonist’s realisation of what went on in the place he was in, by the bodies placed around the room covered in blood and taped at the mouth.

The reasons for the younger people being targeted in our film is unknown. A show like Skins portraying the life of teenagers in Bristol helps create a negative view of teenagers, having a fixation on drugs, sex and alcohol, as well as being reckless and aggressive. Today in the print media the idea had been created that young people are no longer victims but instead the attackers, creating a moral panics by focusing on youths as perpetrators of knife crime. However in our film the roles are reversed and young people are seen as victims. The bodies are all of young people as is the antagonist. This creates the idea that young people are being targeted possibly because of their age, and that the unknown protagonist is carrying out these acts against the social norm.