Audience Essay

Audience essay. Every media company wants to target a particular type of audience, therefore, media companies produce texts that target a particular “type” of audience. Therefore in this essay I will be exploring these different types of audiences, these are normally analysed by different theories that theorists have created overtime to explain why the audience of horrors are the audience. The first theory that is used to explain audiences in horrors is called “The Hypodermic Model” This is the belief that the texts are injected into the audience by powerful media. The audience is powerless to resist and therefore the media works like a drug that the audience is addicted to. Another model that is explored in relation to audience is called “The Effects Model” This model is the consumption of media texts has an effect upon the audience. It is normally considered as a negative effect. Audiences are powerless to this theory and that makes them not easy to prevent the influence of the model. The power is always in the message of the text in the horror film. Due to the fact that my horror trailer had the sub-genre of slasher, may suggest that people could start to act in a violent manner in the future after watching the film. Because of all the violence in my trailer it may continue the bad effect on the audience that we have targeted at. A theorist called Stuart Hall developed an active theory titled “encoding and decoding model” that analysed the relationship between the producer and the audience of the horror. He identified three types of audience readings of the text, the one that relates to my summer trailer would be “negotiated” this is where the audience accepts, rejects or refines the elements of the text in light of previously held views. For example to further this explanation I can relate it to my horror trailer that I created over the summer. Because it was a slasher there was a defined audience that we aimed at to achieve. We chose a similar audience that other slashers would have chosen. This is how it fits into the negotiated section, due to it being a similar audience to other slashers, they are used to the elements that are highlighted in media texts like my trailer. They are then used to the elements because they have seen them before and are less likely to have a strong opinion on the elements. A psychology theorist called Mary Jones created the theory that talked about desensitisation. She believed that the more violence that the viewers of the horrors are exposed to then the less sensitive they will come to it and therefore the violence no longer seems to bother them in the sense as it did before. This was a major negative factor towards my summer trailer. Due to the situation it was in and the way we did it, it was full of desensitisation elements. For example we used conventional and stereotypical weapons with a stereotypical story line. This would have been viewed as boring to the audience because it’s what they are used to and therefore wouldn’t come out of the film happy because their needs haven’t been fulfilled. On the other hand this is a positive because in the future I know to think outside the box on how to go around the conventional elements of horrors. Another theory regarding horror audiences would be the copycat theory. This is when audiences will copy what they see in a media text. It refers to how the media can influence and affect the audience’s behaviour. I don’t believe that my horror trailer would create the copycat theory to happen. This because it wasn’t an as effective trailer for a well-known theory like that to occur. On the other hand, because of the stereotypical aspects we have in our own horror, I believe that we in a way copied other slasher films and it made our own horror less effective. In conclusion audience has been explored by many theories that created different explanations about the horror genre and its audiences. After analysing their theories against my own summer trailer I feel it has helped me improve on my previous work in time for my future work. I now won’t make these mistakes that are identified through the theories and it will therefore improve my grade for the future.