Evaluation Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

We attracted the ‘horror’ audience with the use of violence in the opening scene; the blood instantly attracts attention and is often used to really get the audience involved due to it being quite shocking and often unusual in opening sequences. The horror audience usually enjoy visceral pleasures due to the hand (1:58) ‘making them jump’ being a reason in our feedback for why they enjoyed it which is why other films such as ‘Alien’ (1979, Scott) are successful. Another reason for the bloody hand on the door was because it creates a lot of enigma codes that makes the audience (as shown by our research) interested in what is likely to happen next, asking questions like ‘why was it there?’ or ‘who was that?’, this was the type of response we were looking for so we were very pleased. This adds more of an intellectual pleasure to the sequence which a lot of the thriller/horror audience seem to enjoy such as in films like ‘Goodfellas’ (1990, Scorsese) and ‘Severance’ (2006, Smith) where the audience is left wondering about certain aspects of the film for a long while. In ‘Goodfellas’ the opening scene is the main characters killing someone (the video below 0:00 to 2:06), a scene we see again later in the film. ‘Severance’ has an opening scene where someone is running away from something in a forest. This type of opening really keeps the audience’s attention and makes them continue watching to find out the reasons for these scenes.
We also had characters that are around the same age as our core audience (18-30) as well as being of aspirational ages to our outer audience of younger teenagers. By using similar colour effects to recent films popular in this age group like ‘Saw’, we made our audience recognise the film to be fairly similar but not obviously copying. Another way we addressed our audience was through the use of pace in the sequence. The sequence goes from initially slow paced, then speeds up, slows down etc. I feel this really keeps the audience gripped and makes it unexpected as to what is likely to happen next which is another of the horror/thriller audience pleasures, enjoying the emotional aspect of films. This audience, although fairly aware of current social trends, do not always follow them, this is a reason why I don’t think it was overly important to have a ‘star’ apparent in our film to attract the audience. I don’t feel that their particular taste in film is really dictated by having a star in the film. The ‘Saw’ films don’t have stars in and are extremely popular in this market.