The target audience for psychological thriller films like The Sixth Sense, The Shining, Vertigo, Misery, and Memento is people in their late 20s to early 40s. These films deal with themes of death and danger in a subtle rather than graphic way. They also feature lead actors in a similar age range to the intended viewers. According to uses and gratifications theory, audiences seek reinforcement of their personal values and insights into themselves from media featuring protagonists of similar age.

1. Target Audience

2. Target AudienceIn the Analysed Films The Sixth Sense, The Shining, Vertigo, Misery and Memento I think that these films which would be tagged as “pure” Psychological thrillers – the others being somewhat hybrid – are aimed at people in the late 20’s early 40’s – as they deal with themes such as death but in a sensitive manner and are not all about gore and violence which you would expect people of a younger persuasions to watch, this can be seen in many of the analysed films. As violence or gory scenes are not shown throughout many of the films but are replaced with suttle signs of forthcoming danger with the use of colour - among many other devices.

3. One way that it can be argued that these films are aimed at this target audience as most of these films have main actors such as the ones included, and as “Blumler and Katz theory of uses and gratifications” states that people may watch media texts due to “personal identity” to “find finding reinforcement of personal values” or to “gain insight into one's self” – as the theory states. Thus it can be argued that this can only be done if the person in the media text was of a similar aged group to the people watching the media text.