Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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

At the beginning of our thriller, our logo is introduced with rain sound effects; similarly Disney introduces their logo with magical sound effects. This is not necessarily a thriller convention, but a convention of any production logos that occur at the beginning of films. Some are silent, but I chose to add sound for a further eerie, ironic atmosphere.

The thriller contains a Maguffin, which is rather subtle but effective. The black bag is the Maguffin. The audience does not know exactly what is in the bag, but witnesses the male character place it in the freezer. Furthermore, the thriller maintains the convention of appropriate pace. At the beginning of some thrillers, such as in the “Manchurian candidate,” the pace is not immediately fast, but an appropriate pace to be considered a thriller, in the same way to our thriller.It is paced in a way that suspense is allowed to created a tense atmosphere among the audience.

The thriller challenges male dominated thrillers such as North by Northwest. It reveals the question whether the woman’s role dominates over men’s as she cooks the human body parts. Our subtle inspiration for our thriller comes from the famous Alfred Hitchcock film, “North by Northwest.” In the film, the woman appears to be mischievous, however we do not expect it. The audience may have assumed, but her association with the enemy was not entirely clear. In the same way, the female in our thriller is revealed to be malicious towards the end. The male’s evil nature is much more clearly suspected throughout, like many thrillers. The female challenges the stereotypical male dominated films; in our thriller is working with the malevolent one, also described as the enemy.

In addition, our thriller challenges ethnic stereotypes. The actress is white, whereas the actor is from an ethnic minority. At the beginning, it appears as if the male actor is the perpetrator, which corresponds to the racial stereotype that ethnic minorities cause mischief. Nevertheless, this is challenged after the audience realises that the white actress is also involved in the mischief. Jamie Foxx from Collateral conforms to the stereotype as he is the “good guy,” and Tom Cruize, the white actor is the “bad guy.” This challenges the typical viewpoints as both our characters are guilty, in addition there is a sense of racial equality.

The main male character develops an obscure behaviour from guilty characters in thrillers. He immediately looks suspicious by his obscure behaviour, which alerts the audience to be aware of his actions. Similarly, in Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” the male character that assists the woman at the hotel also causes the audience to be aware of his actions because of his awkward behaviour. The behaviours between the two charcters are not the same, but they both raise audience awareness. The male character’s behaviour illustrates suspicion that occurs in all thrillers because we do not know what to expect.

Moreover, the cannibalism in “Sweeny Todd,” is developed into our thriller. The Sweeny Todd murders his clients, for Mrs Loveitt meat pies. Likewise, in our thriller, the female character cooks human body parts for her husband. This makes it more gruesome as he is aware of what he is eating. On the other hand, the town does not know they are eating humans “Sweeny Todd.” He does it out of bad intentions, but in our thriller the characters’ intentions are not revealed, which advance the mysterious elements in the thriller.