SR: The semiotic analysis of our idea

 Audiences:

Below you can see a link to an article from box office, that shows which audience went to watch the premier of "The Purge" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". You will see that the audience was mainly young adults under 25. And there were around 50%-60% of women and 40-50% males.

http://www.thewrap.com/box-office-how-horror-films-conjuring-win-scaring-young-women-104901/

When reading this article you quickly ask yourself: Why are so many women going to watch a horror movie? You would mainly consider a horror movie to be addressed to a male audience. A very simple explanation for this is that the main protagonist in most horror movies is a woman.

Our film opening will also be with a female main protagonist. Moreover, we looked at bbfc and looked at the rating system. Our film opening would be most likely to be rated at 15. If clicking the link below, you will see that the age rate of 15+ is allowed to include any of the following:

• Strong violence
• Frequent strong language
• Portrays of sexual activity
• Strong verbal references to sex
• Nudity 
• Scenes of violence
• Discriminatory language or behaviour 
• Drug taking 

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/what-classification/15

Due to this age rate our primary audience would be young adults aged between 15 and 25.
Our secondary audience would be the people interested in the horror genre.


Genres:

When watching a movie there is always a main genre e.g. horror in the movie "Scary Movie".
However, there are also other genres that are or can be linked to it. One genre that could for example be linked to "Scary Movie" and also our film opening, is the slasher genre. In this genre, there is a main killer who is nearly always trying to rape or kill young women. One important signifier for the slasher genre, is that the killer will kill the victim with a knife. The knife is phallic, which means that it is a symbol for a sexual assault towards the victim. The term phallic, comes from Freud's psychosexual analysis of the 5 psychosexual stages. (phallic stage is the 3rd stage). It can therefore also be applied to media.

Representation:

For our stereotypes in our film opening, we have Olivia (played by Bronwen), who is portrayed as a very girly girl, who only cares about her friends, make-up and hair. Whereas our killer (played by Jonathan), is a stereotypical killer, where you don't see the face, he is wearing a mask and wants to kill Olivia with a knife.
We chose not to do any counter stereotypes, because horror is a very common genre and these two character's are stereotypes, which are considered to be the normative in society.