Audience viewing

We have decided to rate our film as a 15 for a number of reasons. 

Firstly if we look back at our target audience research we found out that the most suitable age group was between 16 and 21, therefore rating our film as 15 enables 16 and 17 year-olds to view it too which I believe is important because they were the age group most likely to watch our film. 

It also means that people will assume the film will not be as gruesome and horrific as an 18 and therefore those who are less keen on horror films might feel as though they could watch this one. 

More importantly however, we could not rate our film anything below a 15 for reasons we found out whilst looking at audience theory:

Audience can be grouped into too types, a passive audience who believe what they see and are somewhat brainwashed and an active audience who take the time to think about the meaning behind what they see. The Hypodermic Needle Theory suggests that the mass audience are passive and therefore media 'injects' ideas into a passive audience in particular with horror films. 

An example of this theory is the infamous radio dramatisation of the sciene fiction novel, 'The war of the worlds' in 1938 which was performed like a contemporary new broadcast . However the audience listen to this simulation and began to believe that it was in fact a genuine account of an alien invasion and began hiding in homes and preparing weapons as an attempt to defend themselves from the supposed attack. 

In this sense, horror films can be dangerous as the audience receive the information they see, such as violence and crime and make no attempt on their part to process or challenge it thus them becoming vulnerable and easily manipulated by the film. This is especially dangerous with children who are known to be quite gullible and would perhaps watch a movie such as 'Scream' and take it's ideologies as the norm. 

Therefore our film is not suitable for children as it will contain violence in some form and therefore must be rated at least a 15. 

Within a 15 rated film the following features may be shown:

• Strong violence
• Frequent strong language
• Portrayals of sexual activity
• Strong verbal references to sex
• Sexual nudity
• Brief scenes of sexual violence or verbal references to sexual violence
• Discriminatory language or behaviour
• Drug taking