AUDIENCE

We decided that in order to improve our film we needed to do mroe research into our target audience. I found the statement below on the Digital Film Archive:

'horror movies make a direct appeal to our emotions - the fear and desire to be frightened, to be taken to the edge of our cinema seats. Horror movies have therefore been popular with adult audiences and have a particular appeal to young people.'

I then read a short paper on the Analysis of Genre Prefrences in UK Film Audiences on a blog posted by Nick Redfern:

'male audience members exhibit stronger preferences for science fiction, action/advernture and horror films while women preferred romantic comedies and family films.'

'younger respondents were more likely to select comedy and horror as their favourite genres, whereas older audience members were more likely to select dramas, documentaries and classic films.'

This research concludes that without specifically directing it at a target audience, young males are more likely to watch zombie movies than any other type of person. However, now that we know this, we need to be careful that we do not limit ourselves to appealing to the mindset of this category of people.

We need to remember not to make it pure action but to also involve enough emotion so that it will also appeal to other members of the British filmgoing population. However, as it is a zombie film, it will never be a family film so we do also have a fair amount of freedom with what we put in. For example, as we are not aiming it at families of 4 with young children, we can add as much gore as our abilities will allow.

Now that we have researched our limitations we can adjust our film accordingly so that it is more suitable for our target population and more appealing.