Evaluate Your own Trailer and other media text in relation to Audience

The content of media text and the way that it is presented to an audience can have different effects. There are some ways in which the text can be handled or understood by an audience in an active way or opposing in a passive way.

One model of how media text affects an audience in the hypodermic needle model. Like the name suggests the audience is effected in a passive way in which they aren’t able to accept or interpret the text as their own but instead the message is injected into the mind of the audience by powerful syringe-like media.

Another theory is reception theory. This is the idea that the text is coded by the producer and is meant to be decoded by the audience. This is thought to be an active way in which the audience receives text as they are meant to come to their own conclusion and understanding of the text presented to them. There are three different ways that they can decode the text. They can decode it in the dominant or preferred manner. This is when the audience understands the text the way that the director and producer wanted it to be decoded almost the same way that it was coded. Another way is the negotiated decoding in which the audience accepts, rejects or refines elements of the text in order to create a better or more widely accepted decoding of the text for social and political reasons. The final decoding is oppositional in which the dominant coding is recognised but rejected altogether for cultural or political reason. In our trailer we coded a subtext into the deaths of the teenagers to give a moralist take on their rebellious actions and how they would be punished for them. It’s likely that the audience decodes our trailer in a dominant or preferred way as the slasher genre is known for its standing on teenage stock characters and how they are killed for their actions

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The Catharsis theory states that by watching certain types of media a person loses the urge to carry out or imitate such actions. For example are person may find comfort in watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre as they don’t feel that they would need to go out and do it themselves. They gain emotional release from seeing violence. In our trailer way include some scenes of violence which to our audience may be important in their choice to watch the full film as it would cleanse or purge their desire for violence of their own. It’s in this belief that horror films are somewhat therapeutic and are important in their ability to make people less aggressive as watching violence is a way of releasing those emotions.

Representation Essay

People are represented in different ways through characters in the media. Horror texts have a different ways of representing groups of people. Each character stands for a group of people and the way they act, dress, the way they’re viewed from the perspective of the audience add to a representation of that group of people.

One example would be how children are represented in horror films. They are often the subject of some sort of possession. This is meant to represent the way in which the children are about to or are going into puberty and in this time they are meant become uncontrollable ‘demons’. They lose their innocence but not due to their own will but due to factors that they have no control over. Examples of this would be The Exorcist. Other examples of possession come in movies such as Evil Dead where teenagers stay in a cabin in the woods. In this case they are doing drugs, drinking, engaging in sexual activities when one of them becomes possessed.

Humans can also often be represented almost quite literally (especially in horror films) as monsters. This is to represent the monster within. This can be done through a contrast of monsters and humans. A usually scary monster such as a zombie can be humanised and be made to have feelings and be denoted as relatable to the audience, making them the good guy. When opposed with humans that are trying to destroy the monster the audience then start s to question who the ‘monster’ really is. The humans then become the monster of that film. An example of this would be Warm bodies. There are other examples of the monster within. Psycho is a classic example in which a man who would seem to have been a normal member of society goes crazy and becomes a brutal murderer. He as an upbringing that causes him to lose control when his mother passes away. This representation of this character is to represent the monster within all of us and that this monster could be within any of us and that the person next to you could end up being this psychotic killer.

Often in horror text women are portrayed in a misogynistic way. They are represented as more of a sexual object for the viewer’s pleasure than as a character in the story. The way they are filmed is known as the male gaze.  They are objectified and filmed in the way hat men would want to view a sexualised female. On the flip side there is binary opposition with the feminist version of this known as the female gaze which is essentially the same thing but a sexualised voyeuristic view of men to cater to female viewers. The trailer that I was working on did not make use of these representations of characters as we focused mainly on the final girl. The final girl is an innocent virgin character and so the male gaze would be very inappropriate for her.

Stock characters in slashers (The genre of our trailer) are meant to conform to teen stereotypes. The classic roster of stock characters includes the fool, nerd, jock, virgin (final girl), and the slut. These characters minus the final girl all engage in some sort of sexual act or drugs. These character’s sins lead to punishment by some sort of divine character that has unopposable power. The only character in the film with the power to oppose the antagonist is the final girl who uses a phallic object of her own to fight back. Our trailer shows other characters that have ‘sinned’ being punished for their actions and the only character that survives is the final girl.