Audience research

Response summary of survey

The total amount of people we got to take our survey was 33; here are the questions we asked with the responses below.

 The information shown from this graph can help us identify our audiences interests in comparison to their ages.Most of the people who completed this question and the rest of the survey were between the ages of 16-20 so we are looking at more or less the prime audience for the horror genre. Teenagers who dare each other to see scary films and see what kind of limits they can reach with gore and other creepy factors in horror films.

 This obviously shows us that either we didn't ask enough women or that they simply didn't wish to fill out a survey on the horror film genre. This could be interpreted to show that women are not as interested in the horror genre, this is another very simple question which is often asked in any sort of survey.

 This question was chosen because it would help us choose what type of horror trailer we were going to make, that way we could talk about how some areas of the horror genre are more popular than others. Here you can see that zombie horror films are particularly high rated along with slasher and ghost films. Sci-fi horror was not particularly favoured, I think this is because of the shortage of these types of horror films, the only of these types I can think of are the alien and predator films.

 This was an important question because we weren't sure if we wanted to put alot of gore in it or not put any at all in it because of what we were thinking of basing our trailer on (quite similar to paranormal activity). Once we found out that our audience enjoyed gore in horror films we budged in a few gore scenes into our trailer which will hopefully satisfy our audiences.

 This was another very important question which was relating towards our liking of paranormal activity. We were sure that our group found hand-held camera work alot scarier than conventional camera work found in almost all films but we found it difficult to put all the scenes together with the camera in each characters hands. So after thinking about it, we decided to leave it up to our survey and it has helped us alot. As you can see we got information that suggests that people like both types which gave us the possibility of using it when we can but not fully depend on it, so from this question we decided that we would do a mixture of both hand-held  and conventional camera work.

This question was put into the survey to try and get some information about particular themes or specific parts of horror films that people are scared of. As you can see there is a large range of answers but there are some patterns that you can see by looking at the chart. Here you can see that a number of people are particularly scared of clowns and that alot of them like gore in horror films, we may be putting some of this into our trailer, we are having a mirror shot and the ghost is going to be wearing a gas mask so we have applied some of this towards our trailer already.

Question 7 - What are your two favourite horror films?

We put this question into the survey hoping for a pattern of films that would help us identify what makes a good horror film, however instead we received a range of answers with no films matching up, we couldnt even fit them together in a specific time range. Here is a list of the results:

 - horror of Dracula

 - Nosferatu

 - 28 days later

 - Alien

 - It

 - hostel

 - The omen (original)

 - The exorcist

 - Ring

 - The grudge

 - 1408

As you can see from the list, we got a huge range of different films which simply shows that people (even from the same age group) are interested in all kinds of horror films, even the ones that laid the foundations of the genre.

 This question was relating to the previous one, this was much more in depth with the horror films that were suggested. From the last question we were going to study the horror films that were suggested and this question would hopefully help us to look at specific aspects of each film, look at them in detail and then perhaps gain some ideas. However here we have a problem, as you can see from the graph there are not really any specific aspects of these films that are especially favoured. This was a set back for us but then it made us think that we wouldn't have to focus on having one part of the trailer specifically great and that we would have to spread our time over all of these areas equally in order to get a good trailer. This question helped us understand what the audience wanted and that was helpful in a different way to what we expected.

 This is a pretty obvious question, the feedback from this helped us to choose what kind of monster we would have. From this question we found that people are most scared of human creatures, these results can be applied to the concept of the uncanny which was developed by Sigmund Freud.This concept brings forward the idea of something being human but not quite fully human, it shows that people are scared of zombies, ghosts, vampires and other monsters because of their biological link to humans and how we are similar. This information that we got from the survey which was backed by the Freudian concept of the uncanny made us choose a human ghost as our monster which we think will work well to scare our audience.

 This is another very helpful question which allowed us to choose where to set our trailer based on feedback from audiences. This question allowed us to choose the most scary environment on our list which turned out to be an abandoned house in an urban area. This is a perfect fit for the chart because it applies the 3 largest sectors into one area which should work very well.