Gender Conventions
- When generally speaking, Urban Dramas include many issues relate to the social aspects within society such as gang activity, violence, drug abuse and crime. These themes specifically are targeting a younger audience. However, it could be inferred that the subject matters of many London Urban Dramas are rather masculine and consequently, the gender connotations of these films are targeting of a male-orientated audience. Typically, although females are definitely apparent within Urban Dramas, they do not often take lead roles. For example, in Anuvahood, the female actor playing Maria, called Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace has only a minor role in the film and considering she is the most apparent female in the film, this clearly epitomises my point.
- The sheer nature of our film, in it's genre, is unconventional because there are a minority of films which have successfully made a hybrid such as ours. We have therefore tried to make our film subvert various conventions of a typical London Urban Drama. With regards to our character selection, we have made subverted this by giving both lead roles to females to demonstrate an absolute subversion of conventions.
- Other ways in which we have subverted the stereotype of the genre, horror, includes how typically male figures are used to represent characters who demonstrate a threat to society. In rare cases will females be used to show this character and this theme is evident across all genres within film. For example, Jonah Hill (as Jonah Hill) in Megamind, Donald Sutherland (as president Snow) in Hunger Games, Stephen Lang (as Colonel Miles Quarlitch) in the Avatar, David Prowse (as Darth Vadar) in Star Wars . As shown here, antagonists who act as a threat to society, are typically males. Subsequently, we have subverted this stereotype by choosing a female to play the character of Aaliyah who will present a potential threat to the existence of humanity by spreading the vampire disease. 