This document discusses establishing a target audience for a horror film media product. It considers age ratings from the BBFC and determines a 15 rating is most suitable as the film contains threat and horror but no sustained focus on sadistic or sexualized threat. A 12A rating was deemed too limiting. Research showed the target audience is ages 15-25, with both male and female viewers interested in psychological horror, the intended genre of the film.

1. Who is your target audience
for your media product?

2. Certification
Our film would be certificate 15,
as in our film there will be ‘strong
threat’ and ‘horror’, however
there will be no ‘sustained focus
on sadistic or sexualised threat’.
This is a requirement of a 15
rated film by the bbfc.

3. 12A was not suitable for our audience, as the horror sequence is
required to not be ‘too frequent’ and the film must not have an overall
‘disturbing tone’. This really limited the content we could create and
show and also the tone that we wanted to create for our film.

4. Our film did not need to be an 18, as we did not intend to use strong
horror or gore, strong sexual content or strong violence. By having our
film at an 18 rating, we also would have lost a few from our target
audience at the ages of 15-17. By excluding these ages, we would
decrease our profit generated by the viewing and purchasing of the
film.

5. The decisions we made on the age rating were based primarily on
research. Here is the research I composed in order to establish the age
of horror film viewers. I also looked at the gender of the viewers and
their preferred genre of horror in order to establish further our target
audience.

6. Age of audience interested in horror film:
0 5 10 15 20 25
12 to 14
15 to 17
18 to 20
21 to 25
Series 1

7. Gender of audience interested in horror film:
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
Gender
Male Female

8. Preferred horror film genre based on gender:
0 5 10 15 20 25
Slasher Film
Zombie Film
Psychological Horror
Body Horror
Natural Horror
Science Fiction Horror
Gothic Horror
Action Horror
Male Female

9. From the data collected, we can see that our target audience is
definitely more between the ages of 15 – 25. Although the male count
was larger in the survey, I still believe that both men and women are
our target audience as 11 out of the 21 people who voted
‘psychological horror’ as their favourite genre were female. Along with
this, more males than females preferred ‘gory’ films with blood and
destruction, something that is not included in our film.