Research - Audience Theories

The Uses and Gratifications Theory 

This 1974 theory by Bulmer and Kats states that there are four reasons why society uses media; diversion (a distraction from everyday life), personal relationships (people often see films together and can talk about what they thought of the film afterwards), personal identity (people can identify with some of the themes in a media production, for example a film/TV show about bullying), and surveillance (people use media products like news programmes, newspapers, and advertisements to obtain information useful to their everyday lives).

This theory is relevant to our production as many of the people in our audience will see this film for three of the four reasons; diversion, personal relationships, and personal identity. As our production is in the horror genre, people will watch it as a form of diversion from their lives, as they will see our protagonist being tormented by a ghost and know that their own lives could be worse. Also, many people watch horror films in groups as some would not want to see them alone, so our film could be used by the audience members for personal relationships as they can discuss the film with others after seeing it. Not all horrors would attract audiences due to personal identity, but ours will include a girl being bullied, so those who have been bullied will identify with that.

The Hypodermic Needle Theory 

This theory states that, rather than being active (thinking about the meaning of what they are watching) audiences are in fact passive, meaning that they believe everything that the media tells them. An example of this is the 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in America which caused lots of people to think a real alien invasion was taking place; in some cases people evacuated their homes. However, the idea that the majority of people reacted like this has been rejected by people such as Hadley Cantril who argued that reactions were diverse, and depended on people’s attitudes.

 
This theory is still relevant to our production, as younger people tend to be more easily influenced by the media and could be argued as passive audiences until they get beyond a certain age. As a horror film, our production will include themes which are not suitable for these young audiences and so will be classified as such by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). If we were to make the feature length film our trailer is advertising it would probably be given a 15 rating by the BBFC, meaning no one under 15 is allowed to see the film in cinemas or buy it on DVD/Blu Ray. The BBFC website states that a 15 is likely to contain strong violence, which our film probably would contain, as well as stating that “at 15 there can be strong threat and horror as long as there is no sustained focus on sadistic or sexualised threat” which is accurate to what I think our film would contain.