Usually slasher films are aimed at either 15-24 year olds or 18-24 year olds depending on the film's certificate. Recently however, The Woman in Black was released and given a BBFC certificate of 12A. This has meant that it has been able to appeal to a much larger audience that previous slasher films have not addressed.
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| BBFC logo |
First I checked the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) website's classification guidelines section to see what rating our film would be most likely to receive.
To receive a rating of 12 or 12A, 'moderate physical and psychological threat may be permitted, provided disturbing sequences are not frequent or sustained.'. This unfortunately meant that our film would not be able to receive that rating as it would go onto include several murders and violent scenes. The 15 rating however allows 'strong threat and menace [...] unless sadistic or sexualised.'. This fitted best with our film.
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| 15 Rating |
Only male characters were used in the film opening, which would suggest that the film should be aimed at a primarily male audience, which was originally what we wanted. I know think though that it would be best to make the film appeal to a female target audience as well. In our treatment, I said that all but one of the original victims friends are killed. I said this so that the film could lead to a sequel, however I also think that by making this character the original victim's girlfriend, she could become a final girl which would appeal to a female audience.
The characters in the introduction are also middle class, which would appeal to a middle class audience. To increase the target audience, the characters who are introduced later could be lower middle class or working class.
From researching the ten different horror film openings I noticed several ways in which the film was intended to appeal to their target audience. An example of this is that the majority of these slasher films feature either young adults or teenagers.
We only featured two characters in our slasher opening but we made sure to make these both aged 16, therefore helping our film to appeal to people aged 15-24. From what we had been planning on our production we wanted a taller character to play the killer as it would look more menacing and make the main character look weaker, also knowing the killer would be masked or either the identity hidden.
Another feature we noticed in how these films appealed to their target audience was the editing. Both the pace and the shot variety were carefully controlled. In our case, we aimed for fast paced editing and lots of shot variety to appeal to our younger target audience. We wouldn't a slow opening as this may put off our core target audience and make them bored, which would lead to them not wanting to watch the rest of the film. We knew we would have to have a lot of shot selection to use when editing to keep the audience attracted. We also thought that we could have an event going on all the time, even when the person wasn't being kidnapped or murdered, but we soon deciding not to do this as it may overcomplicate the opening of the film and again put the audience off viewing any more of it.
We received audience feedback on penultimate cut via Twitter from two different sources. Paul is a 16 year old male who regularly watches slasher films and has a broad knowledge of a wide range of these films. LostZombies are a company who are 'creating the first ever crowd-sourced zombie scrap book and film'. They have over 35,000 followers on Twitter.
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| Audience Feedback from Paul |
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| Audience Feedback from LostZombies |
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