EVALUATION – TASMIN BAILEY- DELUSIONS

Question one-

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

For our media products we followed the typical media conventions we chose to do so because challenging the media conventions can confuse the viewers. We looked at real media conventions and chose to use a “horror villain” as our main character which include personality traits such as, a traumatizing past, hallucinations, confusion, and shown as a victim as well as a bad guy. This is a convention often used by real media conventions examples of this can be seen with such characters as Freddy Krueger, Jason and jack Torrance. The “horror villain” usually has a terrible past where he/she was abused as a child, this process dehumanizes them but also lets the audience sympathise and see them as a victim who has had their innocence taken away from them, however this sympathisation is short lived because the victim then evolves into a villain because the experience has led the character to seek vengeance. This is apparent in our trailer where the main character Chris is constantly reminded of his past through hallucinations where the audience is let on to his horrific past, Chris then goes on to seek revenge and closure by trying to break into the house he was tortured in as a child. The struggle of Chris to break free from his past using a metaphor is an idea often used by films. However we did challenge the media conventions by using our villain/victim as a victim rather than just a murderer, the metaphors present in the film make our film closer to the conventions of a psychological thriller, however the violence and depraved past of Chris is often used in slasher films, incorporating both conventions rehumanises our character and seeks to absolve him.

When casting our main character we had to think about media conventions, we looked at Jason from Friday 13 because he is typical villain, Jason is a male, gender is something we thought about because female villains are a rarity because females are often portrayed as a victims, the few villains that are also victims are also seen as more vulnerable in comparison the their male counterparts, Samara from the ring is an example of this, in the ring she is responsible for a disturbing death of many people however she is also portrayed as a sweet innocent girl with a terrible past she is often portrayed as a emotionally weak. We chose a male to be our main character because of this and because we didn’t want our main character to be viewed sexually, female villains are often depicted as “sexy and dangerous” although they capable of evil things they are also often objectified and lusted after, this leads a lot of female villains to be not taken seriously as a scary character where as a male character can be seen solely as a character to be feared without sexualisation leaving the character to be taken seriously as a person to be feared. So in choosing a male character rather than a female character a we adhered to gender stereotypes.

Male villains in scary movies are m often well clothed in order to seem mysterious and are often facially hidden by an item of clothing such as a mask, this is a why we chose to dress our main character in black clothing and a hoody often worn up to conceal part of the face, when casting we chose Emma’s brother because he is a very tall and broadly shaped, he is also very good at grinning in a way that is creepy and made him not shave so that he could have the stubble look, this is often used in films so the character looks like they don’t care for personal appearance, this has connotations of danger, laziness and the idea that more important things are happening than personal experience.