Evaluation - Question 5 - Amy Homewood

Question 5- How did you attract/address your audience?

Our film will appeal to our audience as we have left open media product on such an open ending; the story could continue in many different ways. The speculation will leave them hanging. I also feel like our film that has not been done in mainstream-media for quite a while; our main character really does have multiple sides to his personality, his main emotions being anger and sadness within the first few minutes in the film. A lot of killers in mainstream-film give their characters a straight-forward narrative with progression and basic background. We have a huge degree of complexity behind ours as you do not see much of our antagonists characteristics and apart from the voice over, the audience is left very clueless on what is actually going on.

I feel that our protagonist appeals to our audience as we never quite know how to feel about him. He is very stereotypical to his social group and isn't particularly a social star with the amounts of friends he has- unlike many other murderers within the Thriller genre. 

The character was designed to look sleep-deprived, distant and dirty with his very plain, unsaturated clothing. Smoking as a way to escape from everything and just the overall emotion of sadness and anger.

Many Horror/Thriller films like the idea of creating a sad characters effects on what has happened to them previously (a death maybe) such as; Side Effects (2013). An American psychological thriller film directed by Steven Soderbergh from a screenplay written by Scott Z. Burns. The film concerns the ramifications of an event following a young woman being prescribed antidepressant drugs and cigarettes, in particular the fictional new drug Ablixa (alipazone) as use of an escapism.

Our protagonist could be likened to the characters that have been placed within side effects as:

• Tired and not happy
• Psychologically twisted 
• Not visually disfigured
• Dresses in day-to-day clothing 
• White males
• Personality is shown through facial expressions (anger or sadness)

Films like this is a cult-classics, and have all received a rating of 8.5 or above on IMDB. Here a few other thrillers with a similar theme- 2 of them being a thriller based book and the other a thriller film:

Film 1
Film 2
Film 3

Our antagonist also has this distant personality and smug-ridden face - all the ingredients needed for a killer in this genre. Including the scar on his face. This is also a very safe option, as this character type has clearly been done before and the use of scars and gore also adds to the genre experience.