Research into target audience

Horror Genre

Horror is a film genre that aims to create a sense of fear, panic, alarm, and dread for the audience. Horror films often tend to attack people’s nightmare, hidden fears revulsions and terror of the unknown. The typical horror films include mythical creatures such as vampires, ghosts, zombies, ghosts, aliens, vampires, werewolves, curses, Satanism, demons, gore, torture, vicious animals, monsters, zombies, cannibals, and serial killers.The traditional horror films incorporate a large amount of violence and slaughter in the plot. 

Horror is the main genre but seeing as our film revolves around zombies, it fits specifically with a sub-genre of horror, Zombie-Horror. Zombie film is a sub-genre of horror film that portrays humans turning to mindless beings that feed of flesh of others. Most of these films include a back story of the zombie invasion or an infectious disease breaking out. The usual plot of a zombie film is to have survivors of the disease battling it out the zombies in order to survive.

Some examples of zombie-horror: Night of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later.

Target audience for horror films

Horror films have been more popular with the teen culture and the younger adults. Because there are more films that involve violence and gore, they have somehow managed as a 15 from the BBFC or even a 12a in some cases, the horror genre becomes easily introduced to teen culture. Video gaming has helped the target audience for horror films move more towards the teen culture. There are some horror movies that have casted younger actors and actresses which help attracts the younger generation. This is because the younger audience can relate to the characters on screen.

Due to the fact the target audience for horror movies is similar to the target audience for horror video games; it is likely the dominant gender for the both genres will be male.

Traditional horror films need an element of entertainment and excitement; audiences watch horror movies because they enjoy the thrill that usually comes with horror films. They enjoy watching supernatural creatures such as vampires and zombies as they do not exist in real life and would like to see what happen if they did.
 

As there are many types of horror films and sub-genres people visit the cinema to enjoy different experiences, for example; a paranormal film is designed for the purpose of creating mystery and suspense. My research shows that the there is a specific gender that watches horror films more frequently. This is the male gender and is usually within the age range of 15 to 24. One of the reasons for this is because males have a habit of liking to see thrill and action within films whereas females favour genres that are more romantic with good humour in it.

 In order to find the right target audience for our movie, it is necessary to evaluate movies with the same genre. This is needed so I can identify what parts of the movie I would classify for a specific age rating.

 

Shaun of the Dead

My research took me to a movie review of Shaun of the Dead. In this particular website it gives parents advice about whether Shaun of the dead is an appropriate film to let their children watch. 
 

http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/shaun-of-the-dead

 

This website evaluated that Shaun of the Dead is not an appropriate film for kids to watch. The movie contains blood, guts and gore that would be enough to make a child sick. It contains violent scenes which include biting, shooting, stabbing and many more violent acts. Foul language is often heard and crude humour is included. Smoking and drinking is also included and also a few drug references. There are scenes where the main character Simon Pegg is forced to kill his zombie mother and other characters consider suicide. Taking in all of these acts and scenes in the movie, I had no choice but to agree with the certified age it was given which was a 15.

According to the British Board of Film Classification website, certified 15 movies could includes: 

• strong violence
•  Frequent strong language (e.g. 'f***').
• portrayals of sexual activity
•  strong verbal references to sex
• sexual nudity
• brief scenes of sexual violence or verbal references to sexual violence
• discriminatory language or behaviour
• drug taking

I think 15 is the perfect age rating for zombie based films. This is because zombie films are a sub-genre of horror and true horror movies need violence and gore otherwise it would not be categorised as horror. Our film would not include too much violence nor will it include strong language (curse words).  It will also have no references to sex or drugs. Our group will try to take on board on what is allowed for certified 15 films in order to fully capitalize on it.   

The first answer to this article shows why zombie fils have an appeal:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521008

The poll only really asks if you like zombie films, not why, but this poster has explained really well why they are popular - they represent some of the biggest fears we have. We need to tap into this in our film.

This review of "The Walking Dead" is by a female critic who seems to be asking for even darker, more upsetting viewing and saying that this has become more important to a mass audience. This suggests that although zombie films are mainly targeted to men, if they have s serious emotional content, they will also appeal to women.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/the-walking-dead-lori_b_2076558.html