Target Audience

We had to decide what target audience we wanted to aim our horror trailer towards. After researching the conventions in modern horror films. It is important to understand the target audience for you film so you know the type of content you want to include and also in the case of a horror film the tone or graphic levels of the content. We recognised that the target audience for most modern horror films is roughly 18 - 24 as you can see form the graph below sourced from the 'national metro'.

This graph shows that 48% of the people who go to see horror movies are 18 - 24.

We were then left with the decision of wether to go for a specific target or a more broad spectrum. One of the advantages of having a more specific target is that you can gear your film towards that audience you do not have to worry about appealing to a wider group of tastes. However one of the disadvantages of having a smaller target audience is that you may not make as much money because you will have a smaller audience which means that less people will come to see the film. An example of a film that primarily appealed to a small audience was tormented which was aimed at teens and only grossed according to 'the numbers' $ 452,479. This is a small amount compared to some horrors which went for a wider audience such as 'The Amityville Horror' which grossed overall $ 108,047,131 this is considerably more than than 'Tormented' this could be attributed to the fact that 'The Amityville Horror' appealed to a much larger audience and so grossed more at box office. However there is a large difference between audiences in america and in the UK. A better comparison for tormented would be 28 days later which has the same type of audience. This film grossed $ 82,719,885 which is a much larger amount than tormented. There may be a difference though because $15,000,000 was put into production however tormented only used $1,500,000.

In the end we decided to a smaller audience from 15-24 and appeal to a mainly an E class audience this consists of students in higher education and A level students. This means that we will be aiming to get a 15 certificate so we can have some more mature themes in our film.