Target Audience: '12/A' Guidelines (BBFC)

I was going to look into the guidelines for horror from the BBFC and MPAA as I wanted to research both British and American guidelines because they do differ, sometimes enough to give a film different classification in both countries, however I the guidelines for the MPAA classification are not available online so I will just use a consistent cerftificate.

                                                           
(The BBFC guidelines don't feature a specific 'horror' category so I'm looking at 'Threat' and 'Violence')

CASE STUDY: THE HOLE

Why it was given a '12' rating:

'There are frequent scenes of moderate threat, including a creepy puppet terrorising one of the children and attempting to drown him in a pool. A female character is haunted by two people she saw die, including a brief gory image in which we see the back of a man's skull is missing with very brief sight of his exposed brain.

There is infrequent use of mild bad language.