Audience Research

We came up with a questionnaire to ask around college, to help us when it came to producing our movie trailer. This is important to do because we need to know what our target market wanted in a horror trailer, and by also having some background research into the kind of people that would be interested in watching our movie. As everyone has different tastes and by doing this research we could see what kind of things people found most popular or interesting in movies, so that our trailer would gain interest of the viewers to get them to watch the movie. We first started by asking questions about the viewer by finding out their sex, and also their age.

As you can see from these graphs it shows that we mainly asked females compared to males, and that most people that we asked were around the the age of 16 and 17 with a few that were 18 or 19 but we asked no one of the age of 20 and over. Another question that we asked was how a person watches a horror movie either being individually, with one other person or in a group.

We found the most poular result was in a group, especially with young people that go to the movies, with mates or family.  But we also looked at how popular horror movies are now with people, this could be because they aren't normally watching movies or watch more comedy and action movies. From these results we can see that most people do enjoy watching a horror movie, though some people weren't so fond of them. And so that we could gather more information we asked our target audience more questions by asking them why they liked horror movies. Some of the results that we got was that the horror movies were funny, they like being scared and having the thrill and and suspense. And that it was also because they like the unknown twists, or the thrill and stupidity because the ending of the movie is so obvious and some people like the horror movies because of the gore. We then wanted to look more in depth at horror movies as to their genre of horror, the most popular result was psychological then gore follwed by thriller and slasher. We also wanted to look at how often these horror movies were watched, and the most popular result that we found was every few months as people would be going to the cinema with mates to watch the latest releases of horror movies.

For our horror movie we wanted to look at whether to had a final girl in our trailer or not, so this is one of the questions that we incorporated into our questionnaire into helping us making a final decision. Though people didn't seemed to bothered if there was or wasn't a final girl in the movie, so this is a decision that would be left up to us in the making of the horror trailer. To also help us with the creating of our horror trailer we asked where people would like the location of the horror trailer to be shot in, the most favourite place was a abandonent house, though there was other suggestions such as woods, institutes, houses or some where rural where is gives a sense of isolation. Another question that we asked was that what weapons people preferred seeing in horror movies, the most favourite answer was knifes as the death can add more suspense as their is normally a chase of the victim and killer where the gun is instant. The other weapons that people suggested but weren't so popular are guns and chainsaw mainly.

As we can see form the graphs some people find from the horror trailers it doesn't always represent the movie well, and so that people go to watch the film on word of mouth. But we did find that for our horror trailer we need a really good plot to get the viewers attention, and that the music such as a heartbeat attracts them into the trailer as wondering whats going to happen next and which chracter is going to survive or die. We also wanted to know what scared people the most in horror movies, we found out that ghosts seemed to be the most scariest thing, followed by the unknown and things or scenes that make people on their edge and jump this can also be helped by the music. From these finding we could tell that most people like horror movies which means we have a wide range of target audience that needs to be covered in all areas of what interests them, and that most people go and watch horror movies in a group which is normally at the cinema for the new releases. Another point that we found out form our target audience is that most of them preferred psychological horror, this means that we need to base our horror movie upon this genre to get more viewings. Though with our horror trailer we need to make sure it entices people to go see it, as the result we got back from this showed that some people were enticed to see the horror movie after watching the trailer. And that it also also inmportant in our horror trailer to contain a good plot as this is a major factor that gets people into watching the movie as they want to know the story line of the movie. This means that our horror trailer will need to show part of the plot that is going to want to make people watch the movie, maybe by having a cliff hanger at the end of the movie or the main protagonist being involved to make the audience jump. From doing this questionnaire and having the results it helped us to determine how our horror trailer could be developed, and be something the viewers would be interested in seeing. Some open questions that we recieved matched the succesful key conventions that are used in a horror trailer, these are that most people said in the location they wanted it to be rural and in total isolation is a common factor used in horror movies.