Representation Essay

Our media text shows the typical stereotypes of gender because one of the zombie film stock characters that we are showing- the expert, is a male because the males in the media are dominant and strong.

Another zombie film stock character that we have chosen to use is the sacrificer. In our horror trailer the sacrificer will fall down and slow the others down and we chose to have a female for this as this shows how females are represented as being helpless and clumsy. This also suggests that she is a damsel in distress however we will challenge this as no one is going to save her and we might include dialogue saying, “Leave me, and go ahead!” We will also imply that this character is also a scream queen and we will display this by the use of camera angles and close ups of the character screaming when the zombies are killing her so we will be using the Dobbs theory and this will also support the male gaze theory as it is pleasurable for a man to watch a girl being killed in a horror film.

We have decided to have a final girl in the horror trailer so we will be using the clover theory as this character will be a comparison to the sacrificer- the female who falls down. Furthermore, in the zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, one female character is a nurse but she has some male characteristics so this could be why she is one of the few survivors and this will be post-feminist as this shows that women in society don’t have to be girly.

 I think that our media text is hegemonic because we have chosen the genders to each stock character to what the society thinks they are, for example, the expert being a male as he is the leader, the dumb and clumsy characters being females.

Another theory that we will be using for our horror trailer is the Paffenroth theory because it is all about zombies. The zombies represent a lack of independence and we will represent this in the horror trailer by having a wide camera shot of the zombies travelling in a crowd doing the same thing.

In conclusion, I think that our horror trailer will represent different gender roles very well because we show different stereotypes of female and male roles. There will be two types of male characters. The expert will be strong and the betrayer will be a coward as he is not brave enough to tell his friends that he will turn into a zombie because he is scared of the fact that he will turn into one of them.