Audience

The audience are the people who a media text is targeted at and consume the actual product. Audiences tend to fall into categories which can be organised by the demographics and the psychographics of the target market. Demographics are thinking about things like age, gender, religion and spending power. Where as psychographics are things such as a persons hobbies or interests.

Bulmer and katz

Uses and gratifications theory is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. UGT is an audience centered approach to understanding mass communication. This Communication theory is positivistic in its approach, based in the sociopsychological communication tradition, and focuses on communication at the mass media scale. It assumes that audience members are not passive consumers of media. Rather, the audience has power over their media consumption and assumes an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. Unlike other theoretical perspectives, UGT holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their desires and needs to achieve gratification. This theory would then imply that the media compete against other information sources for viewers' gratification. UGT has a heuristic value today because it gives communication scholars a "perspective through which a number of ideas and theories about media choice, consumption, and even impact can be viewed."

Hypodermic needle model

This is a model of communications suggesting that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. The model is rooted in 1930s behaviourism and is largely considered obsolete The Hypodermic Needle Theory of direct influence effects was not as widely accepted by scholars as many books on mass communication indicate. The magic bullet theory was not based on empirical findings from research but rather on assumptions of the time about human nature. People were assumed to be "uniformly controlled by their biologically based 'instincts' and that they react more or less uniformly to whatever 'stimuli' came along. The "Magic Bullet" theory graphically assumes that the media's message is a bullet fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head". Similarly, the Hypodermic Needle Model uses the same idea of the "shooting" paradigm. It suggests that the media injects its messages straight into the passive audience. This passive audience is immediately affected by these messages. The public essentially cannot escape from the media's influence, and is therefore considered a "sitting duck". Both models suggest that the public is vulnerable to the messages shot at them because of the limited communication tools and the studies of the media's effects on the masses at the time.

Two step flow

The two-step flow of communication or Multistep Flow Model, says that most people form their opinions under the influence of opinion leaders, who in turn are influenced by the mass media. So according to this model, ideas flow from mass media to opinion leaders, and from them to a wider population.

These audience theories can be related to the horror genre, take for example the hypodermic needle theory could then influence a person to commit similar crimes, because of this theory it has actually gone to the lengths of banning horror films .e.g The exorcism. Yet it is argued that by viewing such horror content it actually satisfies the consumer with the thrill, stopping the urge to actually commit a crime themself, allowing the audience to gain empathy by sharing the experience with others.