Thrillers: initial research

For part of the AS media studies course, my group is required to create a media product on a specific genre, this creates a very wide range of possibilities, our group had decided from the very start to do the film industry and create a short introduction to a film as we have a lot of very professional equipment to use such as HD cameras, Tripods, 3 point lighting, editing software for both visual and audio content, etc. but our group had a hard decision deciding on the genre we would be working towards. There are many different genres and here are a few:
  • Action
  • Adventure
  • Comedy
  • Historical
  • Horror
  • Science Fiction

Our group did some very brief research into the favorite genres according to the IMDB and decided to choose the 'Thriller' genre to use in our final product, its lack of special effects, low amount of characters and complex storylines makes it ideal for our final product, we don't have the equipment to create to extreme special effects and have no money to spend producing our film so a thriller film sounded ideal, also the complex storylines means we can still be imaginative in creating our film as we are all big fans of thriller films, yet still keep it low budget. Here is some further research i have done investigating the thriller genre and sub-genres to investigate its suitability for our project.


The first thing i researched was the demographic that thriller films were aimed at, this would give me a good starting point as i know immediatly what audience thriller media is aimed at.
After searching the internet on sites such as IMDB and Wikipedia i felt that Thriller media as a genre is aimed at mainly males between the ages of 18 and late 50's, i felt this because most thriller films are rated 18 and are not suitable to people under this age because of the gory and scary content. I believe these films are targeted at people no older than 65, they are very modern and mentally challenging which may be unsuitable for very old audiences.


Our group have chosen to follow the thriller genre following this research as we feel we can produce a very high quality and imaginative film and can target it at this demographic and produce a focused thriller film which can attract this audience.