Evaluation - Question 4

When we first begun this project we had to decide before doing any planning who our target audience was going to be. We felt that we wanted to make a horror opening sequence for conventional teenage horror genre lovers, therefore this was our core audience.

 TARGET AUDIENCE

• Carefree
• Like the adreniline rush of getting scared
• Like conventional horror movies such as 'Scream' and 'Halloween'
• Partying
• Sleepovers
• Act older than they are
• Male and female
• Teenagers
• Student
• Interested in horror films
• Staying out late
• Naive but likes to think they are not
• Like going to friends houses to watch horror movies

We did not want a target audience who’s whole lives revolved around horror movies as they would expect too much and want too much uniqueness. Instead we wanted to appeal to those who liked watching horrors on odd occasions but when they did watch them they got the full impact and pleasure of them. We felt that our character used in our sequence reflects our desired core audience quite well. She is a teenager who is fairly carefree and obviously likes to have a good time. It is the type of audience we are aiming to attract and hopefully if they can see their own lives reflected in the lives of the character, it will make the story a lot more scary for them.

 

Secondary Audience
As our core audience was fairly broad we decided that our secondary audience would be hard to pinpoint exactly. We decided that instead of it just appealing to the teenage age of horror movie lovers, we could also make it appeal to various age groups who love the horror genre. We felt that this would be more difficult though, as younger people would not be able to understand a complex storyline, whereas older people tend to prefer it. Therefore we felt it would be harder to target a particular age range outside of teenagers so we just made it appeal to general horror movie watchers who like sitting down on a Friday night and watching a horror movie on Television before they go to bed. Horror films such as ‘Hostel’ (Roth - 2005)reflect these audience’s tastes and it grossed a huge $19.5 million dollars on its opening week.

 When conducting research about our core audience we noticed that films that involved people of a similar age group are more popular than ones that use older or younger actors. Also we found out that there was a fairly mixed approach on the type of lifestyle they liked to watch in movies. Some preferred movies with people who had a completely different lifestyle to them so they could aspire to be like them, however some preferred lifestyles that they could see and relate to. As there was mixed reviews we felt that it depended entirely on the type of film they were watching and we felt with a horror, it would be more scarier, the more alike it was to their lives.

Also when looking back at the research, we found that when going to watch a horror film, the audience expect to be scared, tense and see lots of gruesome murders. This is created by the use of the narrative image with taglines such as ‘How much blood would you shed to stay alive?’ – ‘Saw’(Wan - 2004) and posters that are dark and eerie. We would also create a narrative image that has this effect to entice in the right audience, and we created our opening sequence so that it would not let this narrative image down.