Eval Q2 Representation

Our film Suburban Zombie focuses on the representation of social groups and status in our society. We focused on the background of our characters, before the zombie apocalypse and tried to recreate the class differences in our film.

Hunter from Left 4 Dead based on hoodie

In SZ we made our zombies look like working class teenagers the reason why we did this is to signify what adults stereotypically think of youths. Youths in the UK are stereotyped to be violant, moronic and menacing characters, we decided to play upon these stereotypes and found that they resembled the behaviour and mind set of a "Zombie". The way in which we created this image was by making all our zombies where their hoods up, wearing jeans or tracksuit bottoms and trainers. The behaviour of the zombies most noticably their slow and comical hobblin was a physical manifestation of stupidity and the stereotypes of "chavs" and "hoodies". The violant behaviour was also another stereotype of youths in the UK today, and how the working class is thought of by the middle class.

Another representation we focused on was social class. We decided to look at how the middle class see themselves as higher ranking and overall better people than the working class and how we could use this stereotype in our production. We came to the conclusion that the protagonists should be seen as the ruling class (the bourgeosie) and the zombies as the working class (proleteriats). We looked into how the ruling class dominates the working class and took influences from Marxists and how they propose the theory that the ruling class dominates the working class using "The Repressive State Apparatus" This is a means of enforcing the working class using forces such as violance. Our protagonists are seen during the open 2 minutes "enforcing" their dominance against a horde of the ravenous working class.

Some other examples of films that use hoodies as a primary antagonist are Harry Brown, Kidulthood and Adulthood. They also focus on the violant nature of hoodies and stereotypes the typical inner city youth to be wild hoodlums who take drugs and carry weapons at all times.