Researching the Target Audience:
Psychological thrillers tend to appeal more to adults, but since the protagonist of our story is a person around our age and the plotline is simpler than most psychological thrillers, our target audience would be teenagers (16+) and above and of mixed gender. People who watch psychological thrillers are more fascinated with the mind and how the protagonist struggles with overcoming an obstacle. Rotten Tomatoes’ (a website dedicated to reviewing films in a critic’s point of view) current highest ranking psychological thriller is Alfred Hitchcock’s very own ‘Psycho’. Other films that made the list include ‘Black Swan’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Se7en’. Below is a link for the rest of the films:
In this genre, people who prefer to watch psychological thrillers like to solve the mystery the protagonist is trying to solve and get ahead of them. Our film does pose a key mystery - what happened to the older sister? what did the younger sister see that can help her? And therefore I think we have the key element in place to attract audiences who enjoy this genre, which is a plentiful one we can assume from the Rotten Tomatoes poll.
While researching, I have found a great description about what effect psychological thrillers have on an audience – “The psychological thriller deliberately uses psychological tricks to create tension in the audience, for example by showing only indirect signs of a stalker or playing on the anxiety of the victim. As these stories make maximum use of suspense, action can be relatively slow, fizzing along like a slow-burning fuse. Whilst the audience may not be excited, they should be gripped by the story and glued to their seats.” The link below is the source:
having our POV filming of the kidnap and the slow reveal of what actually happens should tap into this appeal successfully.
The main conventions we applied to our film to appeal to our target audience are:
>Use of close-ups to show emotions and significant objects, long shots to keep the identity of the suspect a mystery and tracking shots to build up suspense
>Ideas of nightmares and reality – flashbacks of a traumatic event
>A protagonist searching for answers about an event that happened in the past
>Death and people missing
The film, ‘Black Swan’ is about the mental destruction of a timid ballerina who slowly evolves into an obsessive perfectionist. Below is a link of an article about the aforementioned film:
This article suggests that we like to watch someone slowly self-destruct as we can imagine it happening to ourselves and it is in some way reassuring to see it happening to other, successful people. Again, we feel we provide an element of this in the way the younger sister is traumatised by the past and cannot rest until she has solved the mystery.
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