2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Gender

We wanted to develop the role of women in horror films into a more dominant and protagonistic role. Although Violet is initially victimized, she survives the torture she faces. She is presented as strong and clever, through her choices, a feature that will attract more females to watch our film, which is important as we discovered lately more women than men watch horror, so we wanted to achieve a big reach.

Although she is a strong protagonist, she still needs her dad, the male father figure to help her along her way. This is presented in the opening sequence as she results to calling him at the end for help, when she is most vulnerable. This is shown as she is physically very cramped and is not free to move as she is in a closet. Also her facial expressions present her as vulnerable and in need of help.

The final girl specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, the one left to tell the story. This theory has been used for a long time in many horror films including Halloween, The Cabin in The Woods and Resident Evil. We used this with Violet, who will at the end of the film have to confront her demons.

Sidney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell) is a reoccurring  'Final Girl' throughout the Scream movies.

Rachel Keller (played by Naomi Watts) is the protagonist in The Ring. She is a white female, blonde and vulnerable throughout, but manages to combat the disruption of the narrative, and overcome the problems presented to her.

Race

Challenging that idea of a female protagonist, we decided to have Violet of Asian decent. This is fresh for the mainstream horror genre, which lacks in strong non-white roles.
There are asian female protagonists in British film, such as Bend It Like Beckham, and is a successfully trending concept in modern times, although it is still unknown in the specific genre of horror. We decided to take both concepts of the continually growing asian community and the horror genre and merged them to create something potentially new and interesting, without alienating the audience and being too different. As there is such a big asian community in the UK, creating an asian lead can reach a wider and new audience, that initially might not watch the film.