Audience Research (Independent)

The first question on my questionnaire asked “Are you male or female?” by asking this question I was able to get a basic understanding of those who answered. The general target audience for horror films is male, as you can see from the graph below, there were more men who answered than women, the percentage was 53% to 47%; so therefore the results of this questionnaire apply to both genders.

The second question, “How old are you?” shows that the majority of respondents were between 17-19 as the percentage was 47%, and the second highest age group was 20-22 at 36%. By asking the respondents their ages I was able to identify the target audience more specifically. This made it easier to know the specific age group that enjoys horror films. 

77% of the respondents replied saying that they visit the cinema 1-3 times a month. This is a significant majority of the people asked. By asking this question we were able to identify if our target audience was socially active and found that they use the cinema as a main method of film consumption.

The fourth question was “What do you think is the most common element in horror trailers?”, I asked this question to recognise the most common and popular element in trailers that is noticed and remembered by the target audience. I was able to use this information in my trailer, as Knives and Blood were the two most common elements that the respondents answered with. My group and I made sure to include some close-ups of knives and blood.

 I then asked the respondents “what do you think is the best setting for a horror film?” A majority of answers said either an Isolated house (23%), or a playground (34%). This helped us to distinguish what our target audience thought would make a good horror movie trailer.

We then asked the respondents which villain was their favourite out of a selection of “Jigsaw” from “Saw”, “Freddy Krueger” from “Nightmare on Elm Street”, “Chucky” or “Jason” from “Friday 13^th”. Almost half of the respondents answered with “Jigsaw” (48%), this shows that the target audience prefers pre-meditated murders with a lot of logical thought. We decided to make out villain logical as well as this would satisfy our target audience.

“How do you watch horror films?”, this question was asked to find out the main ways the target audience consumed horror films, and we found that a majority of respondents answered with T.V (44%) which shows that our target audience likes to watch horror films from the comfort of their own homes. The second most popular answer was online (23%) which shows that our target audience watches horror movies when it is cheap or convenient to them, the target audience was mainly students and this was a cost effect method.

“What is your favourite sub-genre?” was the last question asked; this was to find out the most favoured sub-genre amongst the target audience so we could include this into our horror trailer. The two most popular sub-genres was psychological (33%) and super-natural (27%)