Our Target Audience 2

I did an updated and more developed post on the target audience for our slasher film, following on from Sophie's post on target audience. 

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.)

SR: Our Target Audience

The genre for our movie is horror/slasher. I did a post, where I was outlining and explaining what the typical conventions of the slasher genre were. 

Before doing this post, I decided to do some research to find out who our target audience and primary audience would be. We wanted to create a movie that appealed to both males and females. The typical hybrid genre ROM-COM is one of the main genres that the subsidiaryWorking Title is creating. However, ROM-COM's such as Love Actually or Bridget Jones Diary appeal more to the female audience because of the romance genre. It does on the other hand also appeal to some male audience because there is considered to be comedy in it. 
When I then did this research, I decided to look for the common types of movies that the general public enjoy watching and found these statistics from the British Film Institute from 2012, which show that the number of males and females below 35, that watch the horror genre is around the same.

Due to this, we came to the conclusion that our main target audience, were males and females from the age rate of 15 to 24 and that our secondary audience would be from the age of 24 to 35. Since, it is also unlikely that a slasher genre gets an age rate under 15, if there are violent scenes and sexual assault, we thought that 15 and above would be the correct age. 

Bronwen and I intend to do questionnaires later on where we will ask the audience what they think of our basic idea and what they would like us to change etc. 

Audience Feedback 1: Questionnaire Results

After collecting back the questionnaires that we handed out, I have collected the results:

We tried to ask mainly people from our target audience, however, we also asked people outside the target audience because they are also relevant as they fit into our secondary audience.

For question 4, I gave a very brief plot description and asked whether or not the film interested them and why/why not.

Overall, 9 out of 16 people liked our idea.

Positive points said about our film opening idea:

• An interesting idea, especially with the flash forwards.
• Goes with the convention of horror movies with the mask
• The anticipation to know who is under the mask
• Sounds like it could be fun
• Mysterious
• Interesting

Things we could improve:

• The bones hanging from the ceiling, no bones would be more effective as it leaves it more mysterious
• "Sounds a bit stereotypical and therefore doesn't really stand out from the others. I would see it but I wouldn't really promote it with other people because it sounds a bit generic."
• Too much is revealed in the first scene.
• Too gory for those who aren't that into horror.

Question 5 asked people to suggest a name for our movie. These are the titles that people came up with:

• Listen To Me
• The Killer's Room
• Lights Out
• The Kidnapper
• Creepy Hollow
• The Man in the Mask
• Trapped
• That Night
• Him
• Torture
• Creepy Basement
• Masked
• Locked in with Death
• Trapped by Death
• The Cellar
• The Butcher
• The Reflection
• Not My Face
• Mirrored Mask
• Trapped

We also found that 8 out of 13 people in our primary target audience (15-35) enjoy horror films.

Audience Feedback 1: Creating Questionnaire

I created a questionnaire that we handed out to 20 different people, to establish if our target audience liked our idea and to get some good ideas for a title.

Here is a link to the questionnaire:

http://www.slideshare.net/Sophie2401/audience-feedback-questionnaire-58756636