BBFC Research & Target Audience

From our research of the BBFC and our analysis of psychological thrillers, my group has decided to rate our film a 15. Three out of the six films that I studied were rated 15, which suggests that most psychological thrillers are aimed at 15+. In addition, we want to aim our film at teenagers so by rating it an 18 we would be eliminating our target audience.

Contrastingly, we have chosen to use a teenager for our main character unlike most of the films that we have watched. We chose to do this because we wanted to challenge the conventions, as a lot of psychological thrillers are 12A/15 so teenagers are allowed to watch them according to the law. However, most psychological thrillers use middle-aged men as the main characters rather than teenagers. We know that teenagers like to be scared as they are the target audience for most slasher horror films, therefore a psychological thriller aimed at teenagers would appeal to them because they like to be scared and a psychological thriller with a teenager as a main character would scare them more than a middle aged character because it is more reminiscent of their own lives.