Evaluation Question 2: Engaging with audiences and Distribution

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
A slasher film is a sub-genre of the horror film genre which usually involves a psychopathic killer stalking and killing victims (or multiple victims) in a very violent and graphic way, the majority of the time with a weapon. 

The 25 Bets Slasher Movies

The slasher genre has its own set of conventions which sets it apart from horror and makes it a sub-genre. (Examples of slasher films are the Saw series of films and Halloween) However, horror and slasher films are typically given similar age ratings.

It can be argued that the reason why slasher audiences are made entirely up of adolescents is due to teenage society. Because violent films are looked down upon by film critics and authority figures, teenagers want to rebel against this and this is what drives them to watch the movies. Another thing which attracts a young adult audience is the 'thrill' that they receive from viewing horror/slasher films.

For our film, we knew that we had to stick to a very specific and typical target audience. This is because the slasher genre has often been called an example of 'genre purism' essentially, this means that the conventions of the genre have been in place so long, and are so specific, that attempting to deviate too far from tradition or changing these conventions can result in a films financial failure. This leads onto how our film opening engaged with our audience/audiences, which I will be covering later on.






Typically, the target audience
for horror/slasher films is 15-25 years old. Although quite a few of these films have an age rating of 18, 15 year olds still have access to films online or on DVD, making it difficult to enforce these age ratings.


Here is the BBFC page for Saw, which shows the rating and explains why it was given.

So, deciding the age of our target was very straightforward, as we have the same target audience of the majority of slasher films that exist.


I found some statistics based around the ages and genders of horror movies.
As can be seen, the majority of horror film viewers are between the ages of 18 and 24.

To finish, the target audience of our film would be 15-24, and the secondary audience being 26-35.

Primary and secondary target audience

The primary audience is the audience that the film is primarily target at, so the main people who will watch the film, for example. When creating a film, the target audience is something extremely important to consider as failing to appeal to the target audience could result in the failure of the film.

The secondary audience are people who wouldn't go and watch a film by choice, but would perhaps be influenced by the primary audience. To explain, a young teenager who really wants to see a film (and would be the primary audience) could bring someone with them, a parent or a friend for example to watch it with them, making them the secondary audience.

So for our film, due to the fact that the second largest percentage of viewers of horror is 25-34, we decided that this would be our secondary audience.

Audience Gender

As seen in the pie chart, more men than women watch horror films. 

This is because they can interact or relate better to the characters on screen, and the main killer is normally a man.

Women are less attracted to horror, for reasons such as the negative portrayal of women in such films.

Character types such as the final girl are stereotypical and very negative.

However, including romance or aspects of romance in horror/slasher films also attracts women to the film, and making horror films good 'date films'; the romance aspects appeal to the women and the gory/horror aspects to the men.

Therefore, our primary target audience is men as they view horror more than women.

On the other hand, we actually wanted our film to appeal more to women than the average slasher movie, by representing our main character differently and ensuring that it would pass the Bechdel test. (I expanded further on this on another blog post.)

So how exactly does our film engage with our audience?

Now that we know what the audience is, how did we enable them to engage with our film and how did we appeal to them?

These are the ways in which our film engages with our audience:
-Narrative enigma
 At the beginning of our film opening, we had a black screen as this builds tension, and you don't know whats going to happen. We only showed the killer's feet at first, making it very dramatic. To create narrative enigma throughout the entirety of the film opening, we only showed the face of the killer (the mask) at the very end of the film opening.

-A false scare
The false scare that we added in our film opening, really helped the audience engage with the film opening. It would have hopefully made them scared or jump and so they felt the same emotions as the central protagonist, allowing them to relate to the character, and feel involved in the film. 


-Accents
As I wrote about in my evaluation question 1, we tried to show diversity of accents in our film opening. We were successful in doing so as we had an English and American accent. 

-Music
 Through the music, we also hoped that our audience would be able to engage/relate to our film opening. 
In the scene where I (the central protagonist) was in the bathroom, There is someone singing "What Makes You Beautiful" by the band One Direction. This would be instantly recognizable to a fan and also helping attract a female audience /engaging with the female audience as the target audience of this band are primarily females.
The music also created a tense atmosphere which really helps a viewer engage in what is happening on-screen.


-Intertextuality
The name of our central protagonist is Casey Crane which is an intertextual reference to characters from famous horror films, such as Scream and Psycho. This reference will also help us to target our secondary audience as they are older and will have watched these older films. When they recognize this reference, it will give them a sense of satisfaction. 
 

There is more detail on this on the blog post: Choosing the name for our "Final Girl" 

 




 How would it be distributed as a real media text?

Before fully answering the question, I wanted to look at distribution and things such as production. I decided to do this on a whiteboard with a voice-over as I thought that it was an interesting, different and creative approach 

(Please note that I accidentally said the 'film cycle' when I should have said 'production'!!) 
 



After explaining distribution in the video, I wanted to talk about how our film would be distributed.

Our film would actually be an Indie film. (independent film)


An indie film is a film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system, in addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment agencies.


Independent films are sometimes distinguishable by their content and style and the way in which the filmmakers' personal artistic vision is realized. Usually, but not always, independent films are made with considerably lower budgets than major studio movies.

Indie films allows the director and team to have more flexibility and creativity.

This means that we, as the film producers would not hire other large companies to distribute and market our film but instead would do this ourselves.

Examples of indie horror film:
"The Boy" and "cooties" 

A really good article I looked at when researching Indie film making was about the advantages Indie has over Mainstream: 

To summarize the article, there are 3 main things that make indie films more advantageous.


1. You don't have to follow the 'pattern' that big movie directors usually do, so you have more freedom of creativity. 

2. Your film doesn't have to be as predictable, as major films don't like to take risks as much. 

3. There is the possibility of new actors. To attract audiences, they often include a list actors in horror films (and films in general) however, this can get a bit boring. 

SO, for our film, we would not have a separate production and distribution company but instead would produce and distribute the film ourselves, making it an indie.