Film User Ratings

Another exercise which allows us to consider our

target audience is to look at the user ratings on IMDB of several films of our sub genre.

This first graph shows the data for the 2002 horror film 'The Ring'. It is obviously fairly quickly that this film is much more popular with men than women, which may be seen as the stereotype with films of this sub-genre. Furthermore, the age groupings show that the most votes were cast for people between the age of 18-29, which again fits with the classic target audience. This was certainly the information we hoped the find, as our target audience will be the same as that of 'The Ring'.

The second graph shows the user ratings data for 'The Grudge', starring Sarah Michelle-Gellar. Similarly to 'The Ring', it is the male audience that have largely viewed this page, and the males aged 18-29 are once again the largest sub-section. Furthermore, the males aged 30-44 (which had a big further for 'The Ring') have a large effect in this graph.

One of our favourite psychological horrors that we used as research was Steven Spielberg's 'Poltergeist'. As with the previous two, there is the common audience of males between the ages of 18-29 and 30-44. However, one slight difference is that this film appears much less popular with females than 'The Grudge', and this may be down to the protagonist; Sarah Michelle-Gellar plays the main character in 'The Grudge' whereas there are several protagonists in 'Poltergeist', and possibly less emphasis on young women. This supports our choice to place a teenage female as the main person in our film.

The final film which we researched on IMDB was the classic psychological horror starring Bruce Willis, 'Sixth Sense'. Firstly, it is obvious to see that this film is without doubt the most popular of the four that are on this post, and yet it still supports the classic demographic which has been a constant in all of our films, with males making up the majority of viewers and emphasis placed on those of a younger age.

Using this information, we can see that aiming our horror at a younger audience (between 18-35) may well provide most success, as well as choosing a female protagonist, which may well appeal to both sexes.