Thursday 3 December 2009

Research for Target Audience

For the past two days I have researched into different stalking films from over the decades. I posted this on the group blog with more to come. I have researched recent films and much older films, also one film that wouldn't be classed as a horror film to some, but includes cases of stalking.
I did this research purely to help us decide on our target audience for our final film. Sophie also researched film classifications whilst Jo created a questionnaire for the public to fill out. Here is the research I did:

'Scream' was created in 1996 and it was the masked-killer film that revitalized the stalker/slasher genre. From this example you can see that usually in the subgenre 'stalking' that it is usually a male character that is used as the antagonist. The antagonist in this particular film isn't only a stalker he is also a killer, this is not always the case in the genre. Below is the synopsis of the film and also the trailer.
'Sidney has more than her share of teenage angst to cope with. Her mom was murdered a year ago, her dad is perpetually away on business, and her boyfriend Billy is pressuring her to go all the way. As if that weren't enough, a brilliant serial killer has begun to terrorize Sidney's quiet hometown, including her highschool classmate Casey Becker.'



An older film from the 1970's is 'Taxi Driver' released in 1976. This particular film, again a male antagonist is used as the stalker throughout the film. The film begins with Travis Bickle, a lonely, unstable vet with insomnia taking a job as a taxi driver to pass the nights. After the rejection of a love interest, Bickle is driven to violent thoughts and an intense physical training regime to prepare for a war on the moral decay of society. Bickle ends up trying to kill himself and to also assassinate a senator. This particular film follows the conventions of a typical stalking horror. Below is the trailer from the film.

You can see our target audience information on the group blog.

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