Audience Research

We conducteed a questionnaire to fifteen people in the college to get a glimpse of their interests in different horror films, what types they like, and whether they would enjoy our synopsis. Here is the questionnaire we handed out:

Here are the results:

The majority of the people interviewed were female.

 The audience research could have been slightly biased as the people who I interviewed were mostly between the age of 16-20 (which is the target audience), as this was the only group of people available to me in the class time. This could have an affect on the interestes expressed in my results.

According to the results the target audience's biggest fear in film type is psychological horror first, then in second place is ghost films which scare them the most. This shows that there is a market and interest in my type of film as it is a ghost film. It is not necessarily the first in demand but there is a clear interest and fear factor in ghost horror films.

We asked our target audience what their worst fear was and here was the results we got:
Ghosts:  2
Children: 1
Ducks:  1
Spiders:  5
Clowns:  1
Eyes:  1
Madness/mystery:  2
Masks:  2
Heights:  1
Burried alive: 1

According to the results the biggest fear people had were spiders. This doesn't support my horro film. But in equal place was ghosts which is what my film was based on.

We then moved on to more specific questions about the trailer itself and what we were planning on including in it:

Here we asked the audience if women/girls in white, black long, hair haunting/stalking scare them. 81% of the audience said Yes and just 18.75% said No. This indicated that the main villain of my horror trailer would be appealing for the target audience. It would fulfill its purpose of scaring the audience.

Initially this question was asked because we had an idea to have the girl show up in a mirror behind a character in the trailer. Instead we brought the ghsot up behind the characters. But the majority 87.5% would be frightened by a shocking appearance of the ghost, which indicated that possibly they would be frightened by the sudden shock appearance of the ghost behind the characters. It would almost make you want to say to the tv 'look behind you!'.

There is a 50:50 decision on the audience's preference to gore. We didn't really want the film to be fully based on gore such as the film SAW, but we did want the deaths to look scary and realistic, and brutal. We did put some blood on the ghost's face to indicate she is evil and deadly. But the only real scene that shows death and blood is the bath scene and the scene where there is blood written on the mirror.

We asked the question 'Do you like to see the monster of the film in the trailer' because we wanted to see if the audience prefers a mystery or like little hints to tease them. The majority 75% said Yes and the 25% said No. In the audience feedback, the audience said that the monster was seen too often. However, a hint of the monster teases the audience.