It’s not so much about the scares as it is about the audience. You’ll hear this in every English and Language Arts class: “Who is the audience?”. Before you even put pen to paper, you should be thinking of who you’re writing for, and why. It matters. The audience determines everything that happens in your story, from the main characters to the action and the context. Think of the average horror movie-goer.
If you thought of a teenage boy, you’re a bit off. There are numerous studies (I’ll point to Variety and Nielson) that paint a slightly older, more feminine picture. Women almost equal the amount of men seeing scary movies. And they’re older women too — late 20s to mid 30s and even into their 40s. It makes sense; think about all of the final girls in horror history. No matter the decade, a woman is most likely the center of attention (besides the monster). And as the years go by, that woman gets stronger, smarter, faster, more creative, and sometimes even more merciless. A huge reason audience is important is that it gives the viewer something to identify with. Not many Gen Z-ers can empathize with a grandpa telling his WWII stories. The same goes for a 50-year old mother of 5 watching a movie about high school in the age of social media. Horror movies are meant for women.
It’s a similar situation with minorities too. Hispanics and Blacks contribute a great deal to the horror industry, something I suspect with rise dramatically in the coming years with minority-driven movies and talent dominating the box office (Get Out, La Llorona, Us, Veronica, etc).
Now let’s circle back to the original question: who is the average horror movie-goer? Teen boys, along with young-adult women, two drastically different approaches to storytelling. Or are they? Common motifs in horror are thrills or scares (of course), violence, gore, and a million other things. Both younger boys and adult women can identify with those motifs:
| Motif | Teenage Boys | Adult Women |
| Thrills and Scares | Pranks on friends | Fear of social situations where they may be deemed undesirable |
| Violence | Stereotypical male attribute | Common occurrences of violence against women |
| Gore | Scrapes and scratches from roughhousing, contact sports, etc. | Periods |
*note: these are just examples of reasons why those audiences would like the same motifs, and not meant to generalize whole populations
Two audiences come together as one when a movie hits all of these points (keep in mind these are solely for films, not games or books). This is not to say other audiences wouldn’t enjoy the same motifs. Great examples are the people you might find at a horror convention — crowds of people of all backgrounds gather to discuss their favorite films and meet others who share the same obsessions.
And that’s where the marketing comes in. Marketing a film is a sort of “Step 2” to horror. Once you know your audience, you must then sell it as best you can to encourage that audience to come see it. The problem is, depending on how you market it, your audience may change… drastically.
“One particular post, promoting a still from the film in which the main female character floats in a pool, engaged males over the age of 50. The fact that our target audience was predominantly male was no surprise — it was the age that was uncommon.”
Gruvi, CMF Trends
CMF Trends’ article Know Thy Audience: Marketing the Horror Film It Follows describes a Facebook campaign to get the word out about 2014’s It Follows. Their hearts were in the right place — focusing on younger males and relating it to other popular scary movies of the time — but It Follows was ultimately viewed negatively for those same reasons. Movie makers (or better yet, the people who sell them) often forget that the audience has to know the movie is out in order for us to go see it. And if their movie is misrepresented, whether it be by comparison to another film or the editing of the trailer itself, the audience (therefore profits) change. We saw this same issue with The Village, The Babadook, 2017’s The Mummy, and Rob Zombie’s 31.
Audience is multifaceted. We pretty much know who will fork out money to see the latest thriller, and marketing campaigns are generally right on the nose. But we must remember that a lot of the time, we overlook other audiences because we aren’t expecting interest from them, they aren’t being reached, or they’re simply put off by what we put out. The audience determines your story, but also your end result.
