question 5
how did you attract/address your audience?
We knew that our audience would have to enjoy horror films to be able to cope with the blood and gore, as well as being able to enjoy the narrative story. We used a lot of blood in our opening title sequence, to reflect the slasher sub-genre. The audience would be expecting this, therefore, we are addressing and attracting more people by including a sharp weapon and gory scenes. Many audiences of horror films find the anticipation, of wondering what will happen next, is the scariest part. We feel that we were able to attract a wider audience by including shots that create this feeling, which was successful for our opening title sequence. The following shot has addressed our audience's needs, as it creates tensions and makes the audience feel on edge. This is because we created a shot that brought a false shock for the audience, as they would have thought that the killer would appear in the unknown darkness, whereas, she actually appeared in a brighter place, which is normally associated with safety. The audience would appreciate this, as it keeps them entertained and interested in our opening title sequence, because of the anticipation of what will happen next.
To attract and address our audience the first thing we did was produce a questionnaire, found in the 'audience research' section, which revealed that slasher was the most popular sub-genre within horror, for our particular audience. From this we found that the most popular was slasher or zombie and people preferred films with gore rather than paranormal, so with this information we decided to base our opening title sequence on the sub-genre of slasher. We also took into consideration the fact that there are many successful slasher films, which clearly have managed to attract a wide audience, such as 'Scream' (1996), 'Friday the 13th' (1980) and 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' (1984). Therefore, we knew that we would be able to successfully attract an audience if we chose to base our opening title sequence on the sub-genre of slasher, as the answers of our questionnaire proved this.
We also found that the audience of our questionnaire liked films like 'The Last Exorcism' and 'The Ring', which both have female characters as the main part of the film. We liked the idea of having our killer as a female as this is quite unusual, as normally in slasher films the killer is a male and the victim is a female, whereas we changed this to attract a wider audience who may want to view a horror that goes against this conventional representation. We know 'The Last Exorcism' (2012) and 'The Ring' (2002) are both successful films, therefore, we knew that audiences were willing to watch a film that challenges the traditional role of a male killer.
We also aimed our opening title sequence at 15 year olds so we decided to cast our actors/actresses which are around the age of 15/16. By using characters of a similar age to our audience it made the film more relatable and realistic for them, while also making it seem scarier, as they build up scenarios in their mind which has similarities to their reality.
By using an attractive characters of different genders it helped our opening title sequence appeal to a wider demographic.
By using an attractive characters of different genders it helped our opening title sequence appeal to a wider demographic.