Research Into Potential Audience: Secondary Research

Secondary research is where you look on the internet, magazines and social networking sites to find out what kinds of films people already watch. I'll now do this for a movie of my chosen genre, horror. This will help me better understand my target audience, in effect, making my clip more professional and appealing to my market.

This is the details for the latest Haunting In Connecticut movie, this screengrab is taken from Perl and Dean, here is the link to the webpage: http://business.pearlanddean.com/films_guide_details/6643/the-haunting-in-connecticut-2-ghosts-of-georgia

This movie's main target audience is an almost equal male-to-female-ratio, and just over 50% of their target audience are 15-24 year olds, this is because the movie is a certificate 15 due to the supernatural horror content. As a result, there are no under 15s going to see this movie at the cinema. As well as this we can see that the most popular group going to see the movie are middle class through to upper class. This may be because this group has more money to go to a cinema whereas the lower classes can't get to the cinema as often, so they're more likely to go and see a family movie where the children can enjoy the film as well.

In conclusion, the main target audience is 14-34 year olds, both male and female from upper and middle classes.

This movie seems to appeal most to the working class and upper class males. Although the male-to-female ration isn't too unbalanced, there have still been predominantly more males going to see this movie when you take the estimated box office into account.

The main age group are those between 15 and 24, although it does seem to be fairly popular throughout the board (barring those under 15).

From this first analysis, I can identify that my movie will be for a mainstream audience. This is because horror films seem to be slightly more popular with male teenagers and young adults. This is clearly quite a broad audience, meaning there'll be lots of different types of people, with very varied interests going to see my movie.

How will this affect my ideas? 
I now know that I'll have to use themes that will appeal to a large audience, things like trauma, death and psychological horror. These themes are not likely to offend my audience due to the fact it's more fantasy than based on real life.

My actors will need to be late teens, for instance 17-20 year olds, I believe that this is important because my viewers are more likely to engage with the characters if they can relate  and put themselves into their position.

The locations I'll use are going to be fairly normal looking places, such as streets, homes and parks. This will add a touch of realism to my movie, as very few people find themselves locked within an abandoned house.

Finally, the kinds of fonts I'll use will most likely be some form of decorative serif which looks distressed or eroded, this will hint to the destruction of the main character's mind from the very start.