Planning: Target Audience

After researching into the supernatural horror genre, I believe that young adults, aged around 16-25, are best suited to our film. As my questionnaire outlined and from previous supernatural horror film releases, I feel like this is the conventional age range for the genre. I think my general audience will mainly be male as this is a demographic which has been generally proven to watch horrors more.

Here is a more detailed outline of what my specific target audience will be:

• Mainly male
• Aged between 16-25
• Have an interest in the supernatural
• Watch films regularly, specifically horror
• Some of their hobbies would stereotypically include; socialising, partying, going to the cinema, watching films. For fans of the supernatural, more niche hobbies may include ghost hunting and general interest in supernatural occurrences. To make sure my target audience are interested in my film, I may have to include some of these hobbies in my film's trailer.
• Some of the music that they might stereotypically listen to may include; Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Taylor Swift, Calvin Harris, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Jessie J etc. (music stereotypical of the younger generation). Conventionally, music by artists is not used in supernatural horrors however, and so I won't be including any of these artists in my trailer as typically, horrors use incidental music which is specifically composed for the film to create an ominous atmosphere.
• They will most likely attend secondary school, college/sixth form or university. We may feature a teenage character who is the brother/sister of the little boy (protagonist) in the film, and they may attend secondary school. This will allow my target audience to relate to the character within the film and put themselves in their shoes which adds to the sense of fear.
• Some may still be living at home with their parents and family. As my film is based around a family moving in to their new home, this will allow the audience to relate to the narrative.

Even though I have outlined above a specific ideology for my audience, I do not want to limit our target to just that stereotype and I would want to encourage many types of audience to watch our film. I will try and incorporate some of the interests above in our trailer but we won't just exclusively include these things as it may detract people who are not into partying/socialising or don't go to secondary school, and film institutions are always interested in trying to bring in the most money they can at the box office and therefore they need to appeal to a wide audience in some way or another.