Horror Audiences Research

Audience

      Most characters and especially the protagonist can usually be found within the same age and/or gender of the target audience in order to give them something to relate to. This is a huge bonus when working on the marketability as more often than not, people will watch films with characters around their own age.

Cinema Audiences

      Audience data describes the gender, age, ethnicity, social group and region of the film audience as a whole and for particular popular film titles.



      This graph shows that British Cinema Audiences peaked between the points of 1939 and 1950. But then declined just after 1950 by 1.3 million in 1965 and since then has remained very steady on-wards to 2010.

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      Here is a graph showing the breakdown of ages of people who visit the cinema on a yearly timescale and as you can see, 15-24 year old's are most likely to attend a cinema showing of a film. This helps our primary research as we can use these demographics to select our marketability.
 

Graph from: http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/audiences

 
 Our plan is to produce a new horror/thriller film with a marketability for teenagers and adults. We believe that this target audience will be most suited to our genre of film as some modern psychological horrors (such as SAW) are quite popular within our target audience, and especially due to the results from our survey on a  previous post. To conclude, we think best to class our films as a 15-18 due to the violent/disturbing scenes featured. Also we believe that this target audience will be the ones most likely to watch the film as our research shows us that 15-24 year old's represent the largest percentage of cinema goers (around 40%).

Survey Results

      We asked a few people from the age group 15-24 what they looked for in a horror film and their responses varied from suspense, story line, death, shock, action and adrenaline. This feedback helped massively on us gaining an idea into what people look for in such a genre and we aim to cover most areas.

Horror Audiences 

      Horror (definition) - an overwhelming and painful feeling caused by something frightfully shocking, terrifying or revolting; a shuddering fear.
  (Taken from ://dictionary.reference.com/browse/horror)

      What we aim to find out is why people choose to watch horror films and the outcome was mainly because they have the 'thrill factor'. Target audience for horror are also typically males within the age range 15-24 as males tend to seek thrill and action within films whereas females typically prefer genres such as comedy and romance because it is lighter entertainment. However, recent figures show that females watching horror films has exceeded male viewers for the first time. Not only are women conventionally less likely to visit the cinema to see horrors, but statistics show that the vast majority of films within the genre are written, produced and directed by men.

       Evidence of this comes from the article I have read and researched on the UK Film Council website and here is an extract: "The number of women attending cinema screenings of horror films now marginally exceeds male attendance figures for the first time. With funding support from 'Skillset Film Skills' Fund, Warp X in partnership with Threshold Studios, has established Darklight: Women Direct horror, a unique training and production initiative to encourage women directors keen to reinvent the horror genre for the 21st Century."

Film Distributor

      After a little research on distributors used for various horror films I struggled to find many that used the same.

Film                                                        Distributor

Saw                                                         Lionsgate

Se7en                                                      New Line Cinemas

Silence of the Lambs                              Orion Pictures

Sinister                                                    Summit Entertainment

The Exorcist                                           Warner Bros & 20th Century Fox

The Shining                                            Warner Brothers

The Ring                                                 Dreamworks Pictures

The Grudge                                             Columbia Pictures

Hannibal                                                  MGM

      After researching distributors we have decided to use New Line Cinemas as it has worked with a few great horror films that came up popular on our surveys and overall feels to be the right distributor for out film.