Thursday, 7 October 2010

Audience

The audience for my film includes both men and women within the 15-30 age range, as this is the main market for psychological horror films.

A few years ago, the main audience for horror films of any sub-genre would have been 18-30 due to the nature of the films (major use of violence, gore and sex,) which would have naturally restricted the audience.

Due to the nature of psychological horror films, and their less obvious form of horror (i.e. the lack of gore seen in 'splatter' horror films,) a lot of psychological horror films are given a '15' certificate by the BBFC.

In recent years a lack of more physical horror (such as blood and gore) has become a trend in horror films meaning that more and more are given a '15' certificate, and are thus attracting a wider age range of movie goers.

An example of this is 'The Unborn' (David S. Goyer, 2009) which carries many psychological horror conventions (use of a supernatural entity, possibility of the evil being imagined, religious themes and imagery,) and has several effectively frightening scenes, but was only given a '15' certificate, meaning that the film was open to a much wider audience than it may have been were it made several years ago.

Due to the nature of the audience (wide age range; both genders,) they would naturally have a lot of different interests.

This could be both a help and a hindrance while making the film, as while this means a lot of people can be attracted by different aspects of a film, if a film is too specific to one interest of the target audience, it may put others off seeing it.

This means that a large part of attracting audiences would be to follow conventions of the genre which people want to see, while also challenging conventions making something new and fresh which will interest audiences.

The film 'Silent Hill' (Christoph Gans, 2006) for example, has many conventions of psychological horror, so attracts a wider audience, uses well-known stars (i.e. Sean Bean) to attract wider audiences, and is also based upon a popular video game franchise, so attracts a more specific audience as well.

So this means that in my film I can have specific themes and for example, follow a certain story which would attract some people, and the fact that it is in this specific genre/type of film should still attract and please the main audience.

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