Horror Audiences Part 1

 Horror Audiences - Part 1

The current audience for horror is 15 to 25 years as the younger audience want to experiment more, making them more excitable and are not put off by gory scenes. Males are also more of a target than females, since they are naturally enjoy violence and thrills more than females. The audiences differ with different sub-genres, for example, in psychological horrors audiences tend to have a higher social status than the audience of slasher horrors. This is due to the purpose of the genres.

Psychological horrors aim to intellectually challenge the audience and as a result, a higher class watches this genre. This is done by creating cliff-hangers or by leaving the audience to work out who a complicated question in the plot of the film, such as who is the killer? Why is he out for revenge? What is his master plan? Is there a way to escape? On example is seen in Identity where the audience must figure out how the group of people are related to Malcolm Rivers and who is killing everyone. This results in psychological horrors having a group B and C1 audience as these are the people who are most likely to want to be intellectually challenged. I have not included Group A as they do not tend to watch or enjoy horrors.

However, with slasher horror, the information is  well displayed and there is no challenge to work out the plot, which tends to be relatively simple, someone is murdering people really violently because he is a lunatic and can this one person or group of people defeat him or escape from him. Zombie horror is even more simple in this sense as the audience is expecting a film, which, entirely revolves around some guys, who are the last humans n the planet, killing lots of zombies or infected people. An additional theme may be seen, such as in 28 days later, when there are family and relationship issues, none of which is complicated to figure out.

Most people tend to watch horror for a thrill or to prove that they have a stronger backbone than their friends.