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Caught in the Web

Synopsis

"Caught in the Web" is a psychological horror/thriller following the investigations of a series of teen suicides. What the detective soon learns, is that they are not suicides, but homicides. The killers use the internet as a weapon, trapping the girls in a "suicide support" website and gaining the trust under the alias "Julie". They rape and murder their victims, making it look like suicide using evidence on the website of depression, and forged suicide notes. The case becomes personal for the detective when his daughter becomes their next victim, but will he stop them in time? Or will he also get caught in the web?

Preliminary Task

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Q4. Who would be the audience for your media product?



Our primary target audience are 18-25 year old students/working people of all races and genders because this is the average age of horror/thriller fans. We believe we will appeal to a wider audience than that, so our secondary target audience ranges from 15-30 year olds, couples, and families with older children. Our film would either be classified as a 15 or an 18 certificate, thus affecting our secondary target audience. We are targeting both genders because I have found that women also enjoy horror/thrillers and this widens our audience.



The kind of audience we want to attract is people who are a bit daring, who use the internet, and are up-to-date with technology, and of course they must have a taste for horror/thriller. They are the sort of people who want to explore their fears and challenge their minds.


I have found that when I watch a good horror film, I get a feeling in my stomach similar to dread, but more satisfying. It is like getting your thirst quenched, triggered through visuals and sound. This is how I want our audience to respond to our film. I want it to be widely recognised, acknowledged and for it to gain enough popularity for it to become ‘coffee-shop chat’.


Since horrors and thrillers appeal to mainstream audiences, “Caught in the Web” would be profitable.



Our main theme, suicide, is not used often in horrors and thrillers, thus giving it a Unique Selling Point (USP). When researching other films based around suicide, we could only find 29 that have ever been made, and we had never heard of any of them. We looked at three in depth, so that we could see how they handled this delicate issue. I’m not sure why these films didn’t make it; perhaps they were too focused on the depression of the suicidal person, and not on the rest of the story. Our film stands a good chance of being successful because it is not just about suicide.


Being a genre-crossover, “Caught in the Web” targets more people, as thriller is more popular than horror, and one of the most popular genres, according to an internet poll of favourite movie genres.



We want our reach to be as wide as possible, starting with local distribution, then national, and finally international. Our film’s appeal is similar to “Disturbia” (Caruso 2007) because it is more genre targeted than age targeted. According to the figures in this table, we are targeting 24.4% of film-watchers. This is fantastic; our film will appeal to a quarter of film audiences, so we will take this into account within our marketing strategy. Our audience theory tells us to screen it when people go to cinemas the most (holidays) and when there aren’t many other films of that genre on (like now at Vue).


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