2. For our opening we decided that we wanted to start off by creating a survey so that
we could find out what our target audience would be through finding out what kinds
of horrors people like, why and preferences. Looking at the results from our survey
we found out that the general public from the age range between 16-34 prefers
psychological horrors to demonic and Armageddon, these two are more preferred by
the older generation due to its technicality and historical context in some cases.
Due to the content and planning of our horror opening we have decided that our
target audience would be aged 16-34, they would genera;;y be best suited to the
storyline and characters. Furthermore we feel that this audience will relate closely
to the age of the characters used.
For our production there are two main social groups of which they would appeal to
in the best way. One of these social groupings is „innovators‟ who are risk
takers, self confident, they seek new and different things and they set their
personal targets of which they will achieve. The second group is Contended
conformers who want to be normal, they follow in suit from others, they accept
their own personal circumstances and comfortable in their own making. The reason
we have chose these two groups is because we feel it would most appeal to them;
there is a sense of risk in the opening (appealing to them both) coming from the
young girl who just wants to be normal to play with others and being portrayed
through the boy that he is minding his own business playing football.
There are various films and TV drama‟s in the genre of horror that this specific age
range we have chosen would watch, some of these would be: Paranormal
Activity, Insidious, The Ring, Vampire Diaries. The reason for this is because this age
range are able to engage with these horror films due to them being
psychological, the plot and characters shown as well as the entire mise en scene are
able to get into the mind of the audience and are able to portray the strong genre
of horror.
3. Through the IMDB you can find out a lot about every film there is, we
specifically looked at the horror film genre, one film we felt that best
suited our opening was The Ring it concluded that those who commented
mostly on the film and had the best ratings was males 18-29 year olds of
scoring the film 7.1/10 this appealing the strongest to this group. A
second film we looked at was Paranormal Activity and found out that
those who commented mostly on the film positively were males aged 18-
29 this being the most appealed to category.
Overall from IMBD we noticed that the psychological genre of horror
appealed mostly to males 18-29 year olds, therefore this will be best
suited for our horror opening. We all feel that we are a fairly post
modern production and therefore this will be the strongest category for
our target audience.
From analysing these films it has had an influence over who we planned
to target our film to, due to us wanting to make it a strong psychological
film. Using the example of The Ring which uses realistic sound effects
i.e. the static sound of the TV it influenced us to use similar effects,
using a phone dial tone. Our opening and The Ring uses the villain being
portrayed through a young innocent looking girl, mixing realism with
false portrayal. The general influence came from the fact that The Ring
was very strongly portrayed as a psychological horror with various uses of
mise en scene, codes and conventions and portrayal/representations.
4. When producing a horror film you do need to think about every
aspect within it both mise en scene and how it is being created.
We want our film to appeal both genders aged between 16-34
however some statistics show it may appeal more to males. To
find out more we created a questionnaire which was given out to
mainly sixth formers and upwards.
Looking at the results from our questionnaire we found out that
psychological horror was more appealing to the specific age
range of 16-34 therefore getting the highest appeal possible.
However we have to remember that these results cannot be
generalised to the rest of the population.
A further aspect which we learnt from our results is who it would
best appeal to. We asked questions like: what other horror films
you like to watch? This allowed us to compare our opening to
others in the present day of the same audience appeal and think
about aspects we could adapt from their opening to possibly use
in ours: lighting, characters, scenes etc. Overall we want our
production to appeal to those of similar category to The Ring and
Paranormal Activity, this due to the representations presented
through characters, the plots and various media techniques. We
feel that we want to appeal to similar people as these
productions.
5. Target audience is a very difficult aspect to
decide as for a horror film, as the producers you
need to think about the content, the type of
genre, the plot every part of mise en scene.
From a lot of research and deliberation we think
our horror opening would range from C1, C2 and
D on the social grading grid. Generally this group
of people are mainstream and they accept the
„norm‟ of life. Due to our content and the type
of groupings we have chosen we feel that they
would relate very strongly to our characters and
would be able to relate to the age range, the life
style‟s presented and skills.
6. C1 Supervisory or Junior
clerical junior, manager, studen
lower middle t, clerical/office
class workers, supervi
sors
C2 Skilled manual Foreman,
workers, skilled agricultural
working class worker, plumber,
brick layer
D Semi and Manual worker,
unskilled manual shop worker,
workers, working fisherman,
class apprentices
This grid was able to give us some help to decide
what our target audience would be, it allowed us
to view the various groups from and from C1-D
we think this best suits our horror opening.
7. A further piece of research which helped us to decide what our
target audience would be was Maslow‟s Hierarchy of needs. It is a
piece of information which was put together by Abraham Maslow
a man who proposed this through a theory in psychology. Our of 8
different sections within this theory we chose two of which we
feel will be able to relate the most to our horror opening and will
be out best suited target audience.
Need to know and understand – Explains the thoughts that
humans have to understand the world around them.
We think this because throughout our film we use the innocent little
girl who is in fact evil therefore this can b related to real life by
not judging a book on someone‟s appearance and assuming all
little girls are sweet and innocent.
Transcendence – Surpassing others, lying beyond the ordinary
range of perception.
We chose this category because we use the image of an innocent
little girl which would be considered “ordinary” we then change
this perception by giving her an unordinary perception of having
power and being evil.
