How Horror Reaches Youth; An Untapped Audience.
Horror is one of the most enduring movie genres in history, with audiences flocking into cinemas since the 1950s to catch the latest scary flick.
The experience cinema provides to facilitate and enhance the terror & thrill audiences crave when watching a good knock-out horror film is unmatched - a big dark room, giant screen and a room full of people riding the rollercoaster of emotion with you.
The Horror genre has been experiencing noticeable growth over the recent years, with six of the top ten highest grossing horror films of all time having been released since 2016*.
Horror is renowned for being highly popular among youth audiences. Some research suggests the popularity of horror among youth could be tied to the fact that it can be used as a release for stress and anxiety**.
Key horror titles over the last few years including It, A Quiet Place, Halloween Kills, Scream and The Black Phone revealed an incredibly high skew to younger audiences with close to 50% of viewers falling within the hard-to-reach youth audience of P14-24.
Scream (2022)
CineTAM Live revealed a significant youth skew for Scream, which has earned itself the title of the biggest horror film of 2022 to date.
It also indexes heavily for Young Singles (136ix), Young Couples (130ix), and Full Time Students (120ix)*.
An incredible 60% of the audience do not watch free-to-air television or do so rarely*, therefore are extremely hard to reach via traditional channels.
Halloween Kills (2021)
The audience for Halloween Kills indexed heavily for Young Singles (122ix), Full time students (136ix), the AB quintile (126ix), and early adopters of latest computer tech (128ix)*.
63% of the audience rarely to never watch free-to-air televison.*
Halloween Ends, the next and final film in the franchise will be releasing on October 13.
The statistics highlight the fact that teenagers and those in their early twenties tend to be more engaged with and interested in technology, watch less free-to-air television, and are hence a highly valuable, hard-to-reach audience that cinema provides unique opportunity to reach.
Sources:
*CineTAM Live 2022.
** Scrivner C, Christensen K. Scaring away anxiety: Therapeutic avenues for horror fiction to enhance treatment for anxiety symptoms. PsyArXiv. 2021. doi:10.31234/osf.io/7uh6f