The opening sequence targets a female audience aged 15 to 21. It focuses on the relatable sub-plot of differences straining a friendship, which will appeal to teenage girls. While the film receives a 15 rating for violence, the opening sequence indicates this through loud screams and a dark forest setting. Its aim is young people who are old enough to not be overly affected by gore but still find it creepy. To attract this target audience, the opening uses teenage actresses and a friendship sub-plot that many girls have experienced. Market research showed 15 to 17-year-olds and 18+ were most likely to watch a horror film, so the target was set at 15 to 21.

1. Who would be your audience for the opening
sequence?
The audience for my opening sequence is anybody aged over
15 as the film classification is a 15. However its not just
anybody over 15, the ideal target audience is mainly females
aged 15 to around 21. Our opening sequence isn’t aimed at
adults and not really males, if it was a horror aimed at males,
they usually contain nudity which ours does not. It instead
focuses on a sub plot of a friendship on the verge of breaking
due to differences, which is commonly more,
a feminine thing. The film classification is 15
due to strong violence being involved in the
film, its sub genre is the first thing to indicate
the strong violence but also the entire
opening sequence indicates strong violence
due to the plot of it e.g loud screams, dark
forest. Our film is aimed at 15 to 21 year olds
because it is the ages where you’re now old
enough to see certain gory scenes without it
overly affecting you but you’re still young
enough for it to creep you out. Generally the
older a person gets, the more life experience
they have and they end not genuinely being
scared by it as they’ve matured and can
easily grasp that’s its just a film to a point
where its no longer considered scary.
To make our opening sequence appeal to our
target audience we made it as relatable as possible. Firstly we used teenage
actresses as there their age, we also put in a sub plot which I’ve already
mentioned, which is about the differences between best friends and how people
change which is also very relatable for teenage girls and the majority of them
have fallen out with a best friend at
some point.
We decided on a horror film fairly
quickly and we also decided on it
being a slasher fairly quickly as well
but we didn’t know what age to aim it
at. So we decided to a questionnaire to
see at what age people watched and
liked horror movies the most as we
wanted to aim it at the group who
would most likely watch it.As seen in
the graph it was shown that the highest percentages of people who’d
watch the horror film where aged 15 to 17 and the second most highest
was aged 18+ so we quickly came to the decision for the target audience to
be 15-21 years old.