EVALUATION ACTIVITY 2

HOW DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT REPRESENT PARTICULAR SOCIAL GROUPS?

THE ANTAGONIST FROM: PSYCHO

In this activity I will be comparing Norman Bates (Andrew Perkins) with our antagonist Chucky. Norman Bates is a crazy young man that cannot control his feelings. He murdered his mother and lover and after investigation he was later arrested and trapped into his mothers identity permanently.

There are a number of similarities and differences between these two characters. Firstly both of these characters have been emotionally effected at some point of their life for them to behave in the manner they do. We wanted to portray our character as twisted as possible and therefore Norman Bates was a good guide line from a major media product as he was deceptive and cruel. He pretended that he was not the one doing the killings and acted sad whenever he committed one of his remorseless crimes however it seemed as if he was enjoying what he was doing. Similarly our character can be compared to Norman in this manner if you look at the end of the basement scene you will see Chucky smiling whilst he is pointing the gun at Jodie. This is the psychotic element of the film as it shows him happily killing his loved one with no remorse; again this can be linked to the movie Psycho as Norman Bates kills his mother and his once loved one. Another element that was pretty similar between both characters are the fact that they are both of similar age. We wanted Chucky to be presented as psychotic yet a smart adult; similar to Norman Bates. We did this by the use of the props; he had a gun which showed his intelligence and streetwise. This also proved that not just anyone youngster can get a gun however Chucky did and was able to be portrayed as a very sinister person from the start of the relationship.

The costumes of both characters are very different. Firstly Norman Bates is far more deceptive then Chucky, his costume gives us the idea of his normality. He wears a normal suit and does give off any signs of any evil behaviour from his appearance however Chucky is very different from this. He does give of signs off in-normality as he freely sends text messages to Jodie stating how mad he is and texting you shouldnt of done that to me!!!. This shows that his anger stays with him wherever he goes however Norman can control his feelings at times with his deceptive smile. The costume we chose for Chucky was different to Normans. This was because Norman wears a simple suit and we did not feel that this will fit well with the time period we are in due to the fact that his character was made in 1960. Compared to most other antagonist in horrors or thrillers Norman Bates and Chucky are presented as quite normal people; They dont have excessive amounts of make-up and they dont look abnormal like most other antagonist in horrors. I believe that these types of antagonists can engage the audience further as they tend to understand humans rather then a monster or demon of some sort. However when it comes to making antagonist that are normal seem scary it is a lot harder then just getting a demon or an exaggerated monster.