Evaluation - How did you attract/address your audience?

We addressed our audience by casting actors who well reflected our target audience, for instance we had a equal mix of both male and female, which means that neither sex watching out film would feel as though they were the minority or majority. Our cast are also of middle class which appeals to a wider class bracket across the UK. Though all our cast are from Yorkshire, none have a broad accent which means our product can be easily understood, an similarly we avoided slang in our script, to ensure any audience we had could take in the preferred reading.

We addressed a youth audience with non explicit sexual references, e.g. the male character fastening his belt buckle. Audiences within the age range 15 - 24 are more likely to take interest in sexual references than those who are older. As well as this casting our female scream queen and giving her a more revealing costume meant that the sexual references were aimed towards heterosexual audiences, which sticks to the conventions of the horror genre. This also prevents narrowing the audience interest, whereas some films such as the recent 'I Love you Phillip Morris' may do, as explicit homosexual references can deter some audiences.

We attracted out audience by using humour with in the dialogue, for example our character of 'George' mouths a swearword to express his surprise which during audience feedback often got a laugh. The fact that the word isn't audibly pronounced means that strong language doesn't affect the age rating of the product which helps us to address a wider audience.


During the research and planning stages of this course, it is obvious that the key selling point of any good horror is graphic, yet believable violence. We attracted our audience of existing horror/slasher film fans by in putting violence and gore. We made it as believable as we could by creating fake blood and using real weapons, yet we were unable to film contact between the knife and our character's body. This would have achieved a better affect and appealed more to our audience if our product had a bigger budget, instead we just had to cleverly frame the shots to insinuate genuine violence. This was a method used in Hitchcock's slasher 'Psycho' which was low budget and such special effects weren't available then.

As well as this, our audience of horror fans would be well aware of horror genre conventions. This is clear from the spoof film 'Scream' which plays on the fact that everybody knows what typically happens. This helps to create and build tension as the scene clearly builds up to a violent act. One of the crucial aspects to this build up is the music, which is an aspect we put into our product. The way this music interferes with the heartbeat to create suspense is one of the main reasons why people watch horror films and gain pleasure from the experience. By inputting these crucial aspects of horror we too attracted the audience and made our product a pleasurable experience for viewing.
 
We also at certain points used a privileged point of view which included the view point of the killer. This is well used in almost all media products, with the rare few such as The Prodigy's music video for "Smack My Bitch Up" which focuses entirely on point of view of the central protagonist. By using the killer point of view shots we gave the audience the ability to see the danger signs before our characters do which again, builds up anticipation of the violence which is key to audience pleasure.