Results and Analysis of Target Audience Research

The research methodology we used was an online survey, via surveymonkey.com. Survey monkey is a website which allows you to quickly and easily create an online survey and distibute it via the web. Since the main target audience for a horror film tends to be young adults/teenagers, this was a very appropriate method to use as this age group tends to be the group that uses the internet most often. People are also usually more likely to complete an online survey then they are to take a form and fill it out with a pen. Another advantage  of using a web-based survey is the ease in which you can share it via social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Overall, doing a survey like this online is quicker and easier in every way - it's easier to create, quick to change and edit, easy and convinent to share, and more convinient for people to complete. The free version of survey monkey also offers basic analysis in terms of percentages, which comes in handy. Disadvanatages are minimal - although perhaps one is that the range of age group that you will find online is not as vast as it could be if you used a 'paper method' of taking the survey. By doing an online survey you tend to limit yourself to to a younger age group unless you are a large company with powerful marketing tools. Overall though, this disadvanatge is no-where near enough to outweigh the vast and heavy advantages.

Before I go into any detail as to the answers we got about Horror Films, it is important to know who we actually asked and if they even like Horror Films.

We first asked : Are you male or female?

35 people answered the questions, of which 60% (21) were male and 40% (14) were female, so a slight majority of our responders were male.

We then asked about age.

Again, 35 people answered, of which 88.6% (31) were ages between 15-24. One person said they were 25-30, two people said 51-60 and 1 person said 61 of older. We suspect these three older people were actually younger people who didn't take the survey seriously, but we do not know that for a fact.

Our Third question before we moved onto more specific ones was about how much the person answering actually likes horror films. We asked them to give us an answer on a scale of 1-5, 1 meaning they hated them and 5 meaning they love them. Once again, the response count was 35, and the average rating was 3.14. We can reasonably assume the a rating of 3 means that they think Horror films are 'okay,' and 4 meant that they found them to be 'pretty good' based on the fact that we stated that '1' was hate and '5' was love. The ratings of 3 and 4 both got an equal response of 31.4% (11) with 1 getting the lowest amount of votes, with just 5.7% (2). 5 also received a low amount of votes with only 8.6% (3). However 8 people (22.9%) voted for rating number 2, which we can assume means that they don't really like them that much, but they don't hate them. This eventually means that over 70% of people who took this survey think Horror films in general are 'Okay' or better.

The fourth question we asked was "What type of horror do you enjoy the most?"

The most popular option was paranormal, with 29.4%, and other popular options were Psychological and Zombie with 23.5% and 14.7% respectively. Our horror Movie trailer is a mixture of Paranormal and documentary. It is interesting to see that Paranormal was the top voted for option, but documentary was included and did not get a single vote. This may be because the two tend to cross over quite a lot, for example the paranormal activity films, and since you could only vote for one, people classed it as paranormal rather than documentary.

Our next question was a simple yes or no - asking whether Directors, Actors, Franchise or companies will effect peoples likelihood to watch a film. Surprisingly to me, 62.9% of our surveyed people answered Yes, that the likelihood of them watching a film would be swayed by one of those things. Whilst it is understandable, I personally would expect most people to have said 'No' because they would simple base their decision on whether they think the film looks good or not. Of course though, if a one particular director makes films that one person always seems to enjoy, it is expected that when this director makes another film, this person will be swayed to see it just because of the director.

We then asked for what reason people would choose to watch a horror film based on a trailer alone. We also allowed people to choose as many as applied for this question.

Scariness was the most popular with 60% and 21 votes, clearly showing that people to tend to watch horror films for the thrills of being scared by them. Actors was somewhat surprisingly 2nd highest 19 votes. Directors received the least votes but with 8 votes it still got 22.9%, and 'previous films' was also high with 18 votes. This means that upon watching a horror trailer, the people we asked (mainly young people) will be influenced to watch a horror trailer by it's scariness, what the previous film was like (If this applies) and what actors are in it. We can use this information for our own trailer - obviously previous films and actors are not something which we have anything to show for, but scariness is something that we should definitely concentrate on.

We then asked about the settings of horror movies, and what settings people tend to prefer.

As you can see, haunted buildings was the most popular option with 38.2% of the voting, with urban close behind. These are perhaps the most obvious choices since they are very common settings for horror films. Our setting, which was already essentially decided was 'forest/swamp' was third in terms of percentage, with 14.7% of the votes. whilst it is interesting to see that the more stereotypical "Haunted House" was the most popular option, it was never a location that we really considered as we wanted something a little less cliche - of course a forest or swamp isn't out of the ordinary for horror by any means, but I think it was an appropriate setting for the storyline that we had.

Out 8th question was asking who you would be most likely to go and see a horror film with.

By far and away the most people option was a mixed group of male and females, which if anything shows that horror is a popular option for both sexes to watch. Whilst a romantic film may seem too "Girly" and an action film too "Boyish" it seems that horror has somehow found itself in the middle in terms of both sexes being prepared to watch it - 54.3% voted for mixed group and a futher 20% (2nd place) for couple. The only other option above 10% was 'group of same sex' with 14.3%. This doesn't really tell us anything about gender but adds a further percentage to people that are most likely to see of horror film with a group of friends.

The final question was the only one which wasn't a vote, and that was because we asked people what their favourite horror film was and why. Some of the more interesting responses were as follows:

"Silence of the Lambs - great film from beginning to end, fantastic acting and true suspense."

"Strangers or the blair witch project both scared the sh*t out of me when i watched them for the first time!"

"Paranormal activity - it was the only horror film I've seen that properly made me want to poo myself. Super scary stuff."

"28 days later - the suspense created is brilliant and the effects on the zombies are very realistic and scary"

"The Grudge, it is on of the only films I found scary and kept me on edge, I liked the thrill of the film and the strory was great :D"

Overall, the responses did seem to be based around scariness, jumpiness, and suspense, and many responses talk of how scary their selected film was and how it kept them on the edge of their seat. This of course still applies to a trailer, if anything even more so, which means when editing the trailer and thinking about sound effects and music, we need to concentrate on creating a suspense leading to genuinely jumpy moments.