Primary Audience Research

My interpretation of my target audience for my genre (Psychological) are in their late teens to early twenties or over because it will feature sensitive subjects, blood and violence.  The reason why my trailer is not targeted towards younger audience because it might be too intellectually demanding. Psychological Thriller films like The Sixth Sense, Black Swan and Memento are usually targeted towards adults and young adults, therefore my trailer should be targeted to audience who are over the age of 15. Moreover, my trailer will have a character that looks quite horrifying, this addition to the trailer could scare away younger audience. Even though a lot of Psychological Thrillers have their target audience over 18, my film in particular will be available for audience that are slightly younger because it will not contain sexually explicit content and strong language.

I believe that my target audience will me male as well as female, but could be targeted slightly more to males because the film is serious driven. I also think that my target audience are universal because there isn't a specific location the film should be filmed at and it involves something that everyone has, which is the mind meaning that the audience could be of any nationality and skin colour. Additionally, I believe that my audience who are interested into horror, mystery and psychology could be interested in movies such as "The Wailing", "Dead Silence" and "Black Swan" films. Additionally, it's possible that some percentage of my audience could be involved in a job that involves psychology, therefore I would need to be slightly cautions around the topic and do more research on mental illness.Additionally, my audience are into reading (particularly mystery novels and books) in order to stimulate their minds.

 I've decided to draw an average viewer of my trailer to better understand what kind of people would be watching it. I predict that slightly more males would watch this trailer rather than females because of the genre (psychological thriller) even though both genders would be targeted because horror and psychological would be suitable for females as well as males. The reason why I believe that there would be more males watching the film is because males are usually targeted stereotypically for horrors and thrillers in the industry. I've picked out an average hair and eye colour.

On the other hand, judging the predictions of other films, the female audience watch horror based films slightly more than male audience (usually from %10 less to 10% more than males) based on audience statistics from previously finished horror films. For example, I visited http://business.pearlanddean.com/films_guide to find out the statistics for "Ouija: Origin Of Evil" As it hasn't been released yet, they use the audience gender percentage from a similar but different horror film. 

The statistics say that majority of the audience for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" were male. Therefore, it's likely that more males would watch the Ouija. However, in other horror films, there were more females watching rather than males. "House at the End of the Street" for example, had 43% males watching the film compared to 57% of females. 

In order to find out more about my target audience, I will be creating a survey in order to make sure what their interests are instead of guessing on stereotypical predictions.