Target Audiences for Thriller films

I think that a target audience can be quite hard to pin down because although some social groupings are into the same sorts of movies, it can be hard to generalise. However, particularly with a genre like Thriller films, there are certain people that you can rule out of your target audience such as young children (and depending on the nature of the film, possibly even anyone under 15 or 18).

Creating a film for a younger generation (such as the 15-25/30 age group) would make decisions about characters, locations, language, graphics... etc. quite easy because a director could make these choices specifically to target a younger audience- for example using young, popular actors and using lots of attention grabbing special effects or camera angles.

If you are aiming for a more adult audience (eg. 18+) you may choose to make the actors/locations/characters... more neutral, or atleast have more variety in your film. For example, an actor like Zac Efron would perhaps be better suited to a younger target audience. Bruce Willis or Gearge Clooney might be more appealing to a slightly older age range. Some directors may decide to expand the target audience (in order to increase box office sales), in which case somebody like Brad Pitt, who falls in the middle of the age brackets, could appeal to both ends of the spectrum.

Alot of directors do make definate decisions when creating a film because the more specific the target audience, the more powerful it should be. For example, some thriller films are extremely mysterious and pyschological (requiring a fairly intelligent audience) whereas others are extremely explicit- invloving lots of blood, fast car chases and stereotypical characters.

I think that when it comes to putting together our own Thriller film opening, we should make it interesting for young people like us to watch. However, I think it would be good to avoid a limited target audience (such as 15-25) because this could restrict our ideas slightly and it could become cliched and not so "thrilling".

Obviously our work will be done as a group but at the moment I see our piece being quite a sophisticated, pyschological-thriller, rather than a cheesey thriller-with-elements-of-horror film. This could allow us to make our piece more subtle, using very specific camera angles or movements to state a point to the audience, rather than throwing the plot into their faces.