The document discusses research carried out to understand the target audience for a horror film opening sequence. It describes researching what horror film audiences expect and finding that they prefer films with relatable characters. It also discusses choosing a 15-25 year old audience and selecting the gothic horror genre. Two main characters - Paul and Cindy Wood - were designed to be relatable, with Paul representing working class concerns for his daughter Cindy's safety at university.

2. How did we attract/
address our audience?
• In order to attract our audience we needed to know about them and
in order to do this I carried out some research so that I could get to
know what they expect of a horror film.
• From doing this research it made it easier to understand and
develop ideas of what to incorporate into our sequence to make it
the most appealing to the audience.
• One thing that I found out from the research is that our audience
like to watch a film with a relatable character in it.
• I also found out that we needed to use features that would draw in
our audience and I think that we did that by using the best features,
themes and ideas from recognizable horror films.

3. Paul Wood
• Paul Wood is played by
William Blunden in our
opening sequence.
• This character is very
relatable to most people as
he is your typical working
class man, who has raised a
child and she is now leaving
to go to University. He is
concerned about his child's
safety and this is relatable to
most people as parents are
always looking out for their
child's best interest.

4. Cindy Wood
• Cindy Wood is played by
Seona Carolan in our
opening sequence.
• This character uses the
theme of innocence which
can be seen in a lot of
horror films as the victim.
Cindy is also relatable to a
lot of people as most
people will have a sibling
or a child that is naive and
vulnerable.

5. Who would be the audience
for your media product?

6.  For our target audience, we aimed our media product at 15-25 year
olds. This is the main age group of horror lovers as a lot of horror films
are either 15+ or 18+. After research into the horror genre and the
British Board of Film Classification we came to the decision that our film
would be rated a 15, therefore making our minimum target audience 15.
 There are lots of different types of horror sub-genres within the horror
genre and we chose to do gothic horror as our genre and use
conventions to appeal to this. This type of psychological horror has a
wide target audience so we thought it would have high demand.

7. Target Audience
I decided that the audience that I want to target our film at are both males and
females in the age group 15-35.
I want to aim our film at both males and females, because our main characters
are both male and female meaning that it isn’t dominated by a specific gender
so will be appealing to both men and women.
Typically men tend to prefer slasher and paranormal horror films, however our
group felt that this cut off a large number of our female audience so we
wanted to do a horror film that attracted an even amount of both. After
research we found that the genre that attracted an even amount was
psychological horror.
Our secondary audience would
be the older generation, this is
because they don’t have any characters
to relate to in the film so may not feel as
pasionate about watching it.

8. We carried out some research to find out
more about our audience.
Target Audience Research

9. As you can see from the chart above more people feel sympathetic
towards a female in a horror film than a male, however some people are
still sympathetic towards the male. Taking this into consideration we
decided to have both the male and female who played the main characters
in our sequence to be the victims. The female is the victim of the doll but
doesn't know it and the male is also the victim of the doll but he knows it.
This means that the audience will obviously sympathize the female more
but also sympathies the male.
Gender

10. Linking to the topic of gender a lot of our audience didn't mind
whether the main character was male or female, however a
small percentage did so in order to keep this part of our
audience we decided to have two main characters one of
which is a male and the other a female.

11. Then from a question asked on ethnicity which can be seen
above we found that our audience doesn't care about the
ethnicity of characters which gave us the freedom to pick what
we wanted the characters ethnicity to be. Meaning that we
wouldn't loose part of our audience if we chose an actor of a
certain ethnicity.
Ethnicity

12. Finally we found that a large amount of our audience wants a
horror film to have a deeper meaning then to just scare them.
This is why we wanted our plot to be detailed and have a lot
more to it then just being about the doll going round and
killing everyone.

13. Collectively as a group we carried out some research where
we asked people a questionnaire which we then individually
put into graphs. These graphs then gave us an idea and an
understanding of our target audience.