Target Audience

Target Audience
 

Psychological thriller
 

Psychological thrillers are a genre that focus on issues that can be made to appear 'realistic' or could possibly even happen in real life. They also make the reader question their own judgements which can make them quite scary. Common themes in psychological thrillers are paranormal activity, deaths, stalking, someone questioning their own sanity.
 

We felt that our target audience should be roughly between the ages of 14 to 34. We know that this is seen generally as the key demographic in terms of spending power and leisure time, and like any film company, we need to ensure the film makes a profit. On the whole we think it would appeal to a younger age group, but there is no real reason why older people wouldn't watch it. Horror is much more targeted at younger audiences as the cast is often young, and beyond a certain age, people don;t enjoy being frightened as much as they used to. Psychological thrillers share features with horror such as the 'jump' effect but they are less violent, so we won't alienate older viewers.

We don’t have any specific gender bias in our film, therefore males and females would both enjoy our film, but I think females would be able to relate to it more as they could put themselves in the position of the young girls.

By using mise-en-scene, we will use certain costumes and certain aspects of the setting such as the girl’s room to create an 'ordinary' environment so that the viewer feels that what is happening in the film could possibly happen to them too. Many psychological thrillers are based around  two people locked in a psychological struggle and the social class can vary widely as anything could happen to anyone. However the preferred class is the middle class such as the Paranormal films; they happen to a normal American family. This makes the disruption more enjoyable for the audience as the contrast between the old life and the new is more pronounced.
 

Our chosen genre
 

People that would enjoy our film would like it to be full of tense moments where you don’t know what is going to happen around each corner. Many people get horrors and psychological thrillers mixed up with each other but the main difference is that horrors are more violent and physical whereas thrillers can be psychological. They both have a similar appeal - seeing characters placed in situations that reflect our fears.
 

The main characters for psychological thrillers are normally no older than 30 years old. I think this could be because they’re young and because they would have more energy than an older person, they would make it more interesting as they can do all the frantic running and screaming that usually takes place in psychological thrillers. Also younger people tend to think things over more whereas older people usually are wiser and wouldn’t believe in some of the stuff that could go on in the film. For example, in ‘Paranormal Activity’, the couple are young. A further stereotype in the genre is that it is usually women who are the ones that believe that something sinister is going in. In the film, ‘Orphan’, the mother is the one who believes that ‘there’s something wrong with Esther’ and the father doesn’t believe it until the end.
 

I agree with Wikipedia’s definition of what a psychological thriller. It is technically a sub-genre because it comes under the genre ‘thriller’ and there are a range of different thrillers such as action thriller, romance thriller, crime thriller, conspiracy thriller. Also, quite a lot of thrillers can contain horror aspects such as the film ‘Saw’ and ‘Orphan’.

After looking at a few websites, I discovered that it depends on the film who the target audience for psychological thrillers is. I found that on one website, someone thinks that horror type ones are aimed at girls of a slightly younger age whereas. Some are aimed at young men with a rating of R, but some that are normal thrillers such as crime are aimed adults and are rated PG and thrillers in general are aimed generally at ages 18 to 25.

I also found that other people had slightly different and some similar views on the target audience. Someone feels that it should be between 16 to 35 which was close to my own personal opinion which was 18 to 34 but overall they are aimed at younger people.