WS - Target Audience For Our Slasher

Although Slashers started off with primarily a male audience, the presence of Final Girls has helped to bring in the female audiences. Although girls are often brutally murdered in Slashers, the presence of Final Girls has been massive for the genre. Final Girls are often very strong characters and often aren't the more good-looking characters in the film (they can be quite boyish and are often virginal; they also often have names that can be either male or female, for example Laurie or Sidney.), appealing to the majority of females who may see themselves in a similar fashion. Due to this, we think that the Slasher audience is starting to level out more between males and females. We believe that the target audience age is still between 15 and 25.                   

The target audience for our production (entitled Oblivious) will be primarily teenagers (both male and female). Although since we will not be doing an ending for our film, we cannot establish a 'final girl', we will give serious inclinations that our production will be a rather more conventional slasher movie.
The rating of our production, I imagine would be at least a 15. Most slasher movies are rated a 15 or 18, due to the amounts of violence and nudity (and in a more sub-genre of slasher, drug use). Yet again, since our production will be a conventional slasher movie, I imagine it'll have at least a 15 rating. So while the Target Audience for gender is all, our target audience age is much more limited (hopefully the film would appeal to people of all ages above the Age rating, but we have identified a much smaller target audience). Our main target audience will be people aged between 15 and 24 (15 depends on whether our film would be rated 15 or 18, but we would be aiming for our film to be a 15 to extend potential viewers). We think our film would appeal to this kind of audience because we believe they would enjoy the scares, the build-up in tension and a bit of gore. The predictability of Slashers which also allows people to almost join in and to know what is coming would, in our opinion and the opinion of some Slasher makers, appeal to this kind of age range, both male and female.


http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art5267.asp 


Two key bits that I picked out when reading the information on the above link, referred to women and the age of most horror fans. Two short quotes taken from the site are, "Horror is most popular with teenagers and twenty-something’s", as well as, "As this site will show, many attendees and devoted fans of the horror genre are women"

Our Target Audience Summary : 

Primary/Core Target Audience : 15 - 24 year old males and females.
Secondary Target Audience :     25 - 35 year old males and females.