If you're presenting a rundown of the target audience for your own slasher production you need to get into details such as:
- a specific age range + gender/s for both primary + secondary target audience
- justified through specific references to media language links to existing films
- including representations (uses and gratifications theory)
- a moodboard (or 2: 1 for each gender or 1 each for primary/secondary)
- BBFC/MPAA (+/or others) age rating
- test the familiarity of your target audience with the genre, and get some sense of whether there's likelihood some would watch yours
- the historic and recent box office record of the genre
- typical box office, and some comparison with other genres to put this in clear context
- production and distribution companies with a particular record in the genre
- directors and actors strongly linked to the genre (and therefore with a niche fanbase)
- the role + prominence of franchises in the genre
- specific consideration of remakes, reboots, reimaginings, prequels, sequels
- monetising back catalogue through editionalising DVDs and boxsets (Childs Play a good recent example)
- typical budgets, and some comparison with other genres to put this in clear context (stars, CGI, IP, sets, extras all being significant factors in higher budgets)
- use of websites + social media by production and distribution companies for marketing
- fandom: fan-sites and social media, as well as UGC on YouTube etc
Some simple searches...
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| She's written some great analysis on Scream fan communities online (google) |
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| A fantastic book on the narrative structure and audience (using box office analysis) of the slasher (google) |
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| I was looking for hits from the Guardian box office columns (could try it without Gant, others write this too...), and found some prominent links to my own blog - which are rather useful! (google) |
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| I knew he'd written relevant material, having read it ... so widened the search to horror (bear in mind that slasher is a sub-genre and also has multiple alternative names eg slice and dice, stalk and slash) ... and saw lots of useful hits... (google) |
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| Getting into the nitty gritty, homing in on the details of a single franchise. I figured I'd likely find US, world box office for each movie and franchise averages and budgets ... and I did! (google) |
