Target Audience/Certificate by BBFC

The target audience for our film is people between the ages of 15 - 30. The reason for this is due to the fear and violence that is involved. Due to the content involved, we can assume that our horror opening would receive an age certificate of 15. We do not feel it would be an age certificate of 12 as it would expose younger audiences to inappropriate material and could therefore influence them, e.g. hypodermic needle and copycat theories.

When filming, we will therefore keep in mind our target audience and what content is suitable for their age. For example, we cannot use brutal gore as our film would most likely be classed as an 18 and therefore our target audience (15) would not be able to view the film.

We have also chosen to specifically aim our film at the male category as it is typical for males to enjoy violence and being in an unnatural situation.

The typical codes and conventions of a horror/thriller have an equilibrium and disequilibrium. The film would start off without any disorder to the story but as it progresses, the disequilibrium will gradually be introduced to the story line. A horror thriller film will typically have a killer (or killers) and victim (or victims) in the story, normally, there is only one main killer and a group of victims, and example of this is from Shrooms, a group of teenagers go to the woods and are killed off one by one.

Following stereotypical themes, the killer is normally male, Shrooms however abandons this stereotype and makes the killer role female, however, other characters in the film allow the audience to suspect that they are the killers. This follows an effective twist, connecting to the thriller genre by introducing that the killer was one of their friends murdering them on account of taking the wrong drugs.

Our target audience would watch our trailer because we also use the typical character and gender roles, there being a male killer to connote dominance and power, and a female victim to connote weakness and submission to the killer. Though this is commonly used in horror or thriller films, we felt that this would prove more effective in attracting a teenage audience.

We have made this age rating decision upon the basis of the BBFC guidelines who suggest that;