Target audience research

In order to understand our target audience we asked 15 people a series of questions to determine what type of genre, characters etc. we should be incorporating in our trailer. We aimed to get an equal mix of boys and girls answering our survey, that way it is easier to generalise to the whole potential audience. We also wanted to target a certain age (our target audience) as that means we are identifying our audiences likes and catering to them accordingly.  

One of the questions we felt was crucial was the question regarding the gender of the antagonist. The majority of people wanted a male villain. Although this went against the idea of our original premise we decided to stick to it as often women can be the scarier sex in films; this is because the females in horror/thriller films go against social conventions (often expected to be subservient and frightened) therefore when they are villainous it has a bigger impact and is more frightening. We found that due to the fact our villain will be played by a female our audience will be predominantly female. 

Another question asked what kind of protagonist our audience would prefer, this side of the questionnaire fits  perfectly with our premise as we aim to have our antagonist female too. Females tended to vote for a female protagonist and the majority of the boys weren't bothered which means we are able to go ahead with our original character ideas.

From the graph below we see mostly people between the ages of 15-25 are interested in the horror genre. Having this knowledge allows us to market our film in a certain way in order to attract this audience.

From these results we can conclude that we will be targeting both males and females between the ages of 15 and 25 however mainly females. This works in our favour as the cast is predominantly female therefore the audience is able to connect with them. 

I searched the internet for similar films. using IMDB I was able to find the user demographic for two films of the same genre in which the users give the film a rating our of ten, IDMB splits up the users into particular demographics.

Dead Silence

Looking at dead silence we can see we would have a similar audience, with both males and females having a preference for horrors. Dead silence's target audience age is also similar to ours this means we can observe aspects of their advertisement and use them to make our film also a success. 

The Conjuring 

Again the audience for all the trailers is identical which allows us to use methods they've employed to make our production of the highest quality.