In today's lesson we were discussing, in our group, the typical target audiences for horror films. We came up with some initial ideas. We discussed areas such as gender, age certificates and why people watch horror films. For our initial ideas we thought that the age of the target audience as being between 15-30. We decided on 15 being the start of the age bracket as there are some horror films that are certificated 15 such as The Blair Witch Project and Final destination 1-4. These are big name horror films which attracted big name audiences. There can still be some elements of a 18 certificate horror film such as mild language, visceral reactions (jump scares) and a fear of the unknown. However the difference between a 15/12 horror film and an 18 would be more violence, blood and gore, sexual themes, sexual violence and stronger language. Another major factor that makes a horror film 18 is imitable actions. This is the idea that the film might show step by step instructions on things like torture or making a bomb. This might allow someone the needs to do these things and might cause danger for some people.As well as age, we also discussed gender. At the start we decided that it would have been 60/40. we thought this as we thought that males are stereotypically more brave.
After Reading
However we then read some articles about horror film audiences and have changed some of our opinions. We changed our target age range from 15-30 to 12-30. We decided to do this as we believe that horror films are a 'cool' film genre to watch. We also believe that blockbuster children films have some horror themes. 'Blockbusters aimed at younger audiences have all contained significant horror elements'. This gives the idea that younger audiences are already being presented with horror themes. We also changed our thoughts on the male to female ratio to 50:50. We decided to change our thoughts as one of the articles gave some box office percentages of the audience were female for horror films were higher than male. Some of these facts included that the box office ratings for the Conjuring showed 53% female and for the Purge 56%. This shows how more women watched these two big blockbuster horror films than men. For this reason we changed the gender target audience to an equal ratio between male and female. Dodai Stewart also said that 'Women love horror films'.
Film Survey
In order to find out what people like and dislike about horror films, we designed a questionnaire on survey monkey and waited to get responses. We included some general questions such as gender and age. This helps us with our target audience as if a teenager likes horror films but a middle aged person doesn't, we know to aim for the younger audiences. As well as this if most girls answer that they dislike horror films but boys do, we know to aim for a more male audience. We then went on to ask questions about their film taste and whether or not they enjoy horror films. We also asked what they like about horror films and whether they enjoy jump scares. This helps us figure out what to include in our trailer in order to attract audiences. We left the survey for 1 week in order to gather responses in order to analyse them.
Another valuable question that we asked was 'How do you feel about jump scares in a horror film'. Now although some of the responders did not give a useful response as they don't like horror films. Some people gave us some useful responses. One person said that they enjoy having a 'visceral reaction' This shows that people enjoy having the feeling you get from a jump scare. Another responder said that they 'prefer to be scared than to be frightened by gore'. This also helped us decide on the subgenre of our film as paranormal films like 'Paranormal Activity' contain lots of jump scares and little gore. As well as this, one respondent said that they 'love them'. This shows how some people really enjoy horror films with jump scares.
Another question we included in our survey was 'do you prefer the hero to be male or female'. We asked this so that we could decide on the genre of our main lead. Whereas the vast majority said that they don't mind, the people who did decide said that they would prefer a female heroine. This helped us with our character decisions. We have decided to go for a female heroine in our film as we feel that after researching which gender watches the most horror films. We saw that more females watch horror films than men. We think that if we use a female heroine then the women in the audience will relate to that character more than a male hero. We believe that the female viewers will understand the protagonists relationships as well as her security (4 C's). For example mothers in the audience with a teenage daughter will be able to understand the characters emotions and relationship with the daughter in the film. This will create a unique experience for each person in the audience.
One of the last questions we asked was 'can you describe a typical horror storyline?'. Some people gave relatively similar answers being 'predictable' or 'same old same old'. However some people described a reasonably detailed storyline. One respondent gave us this response: Set up a happy family, introduce the horror element. The horrific events happen to the family, everything seems to be heading for disaster. At the last minute the evil is defeated and the family live happily ever after, but sometimes there is a ........... at the end, has the evil actually been defeated? This was a really useful response when producing the storyline. There were a few similar responses to this.
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