R3: Fahmida's analysis of question 6 to 10 of audience survey

Audience survey analysis

Question 6: What is your favourite horror movie and why?

The 2 most common horror movies chosen was The Conjuring franchise being first, then The Woman in Black and lastly, Sinister.

All 3 horror movie chosen are modern horror movies and both The Conjuring franchise and sinister franchise are American horror movies, while The Woman in Black is collaboration between the British and American film industry.

Both The Conjuring franchise and The Woman in Black are horror movies set in the past; this perhaps shows that our target audience would like to watch period horror movies, thus me and my partner should consider researching more on period horror movies and add elements of history to our horror movie.

This is evident in the reasons why our target audience chose these films, for example, a respondent who chose The Conjuring argued that “it is based upon a true story and there are true historical facts”

Another respondent who chose The Woman in Black argued that “it has Daniel Radcliffe and it is a period horror film”

Question 7: Rank what elements of a horror movie poster attracts you the most the watch the film?

The element that was most commonly ranked first is iconography, then colour scheme and lastly text.  This clearly tells us our target audience favour images and symbols over other elements of a horror movie poster. This means that we need to ensure the images that we use in our horror movie poster make a great impact. However, a conventional horror movie poster does not exclude text, thus, although text was ranked 3^rd the most, we still will add text especially since we need to inform the audience the name of our horror movie.

Question 8: Within horror movie trailers, do you think it is important to…

The top 3 most important element of a horror movie trailer that our target audience chose was to drop plot hints first, extreme close ups next and thirdly loud sound effects. This tells us that our target audience would like us to provide them with hints of the plot of our movie. We agree with their decision, because plot hints stimulate curiosity and thus may be the factor that encourages them to watch our horror movie.

Extreme close-ups of characters are conventional horror movie camera shots, as extreme close-ups may be used to show fear in characters and this perhaps induces fear in the audience viewing the film.

Loud sound effects was also a popular choice of our target audience and perhaps may have been chosen, because loud sound effects can be used to create jump scares and conventionally used in horror movies to create that jump scare. Thus, this shows our audience really do enjoy the thrill of being scared.

Question 9: What social groups are conventionally found in horror movies?

The most common social group in ability chosen by our audience was abled people (33.33% over 14.29%).

The most common social group in regional identity chosen by our audience was city residents over country side residents (42.86% over 19.05%)

The 2 most common social groups in age chosen by our audience were children and adults (children: 61.90% and adults: 66.67%)

The most common social group in gender chosen by our audience was women (57.14% over 38.10%)

The most common social group in sexuality chosen by our audience was heterosexual (33.33%)

Lastly, the most common social group in ethnicity chosen by our audience was white (47.62%)

All these social groups have been chosen as the conventional social groups appearing in horror movies.

Question 10: What representations are shown in horror movies of the social groups you selected in question 9?

Respondents argued that teenagers are represented as “not being careful or being too adventurous that leads to bad things happening”, we also agree with this respondent and think this is a stereotypical representation of teenagers. This is because there are a lot of horror movies, whereby teenagers are the victims, such as Jennifer’s Body (2009).

Another respondent argued that city residents are represented as “to not believe in ghosts or monsters, but believe in them in the end to become saviour or die just after realising”. We agree to with this respondent, as we also think that city residents are represented as being more sceptical to supernatural events. We also agree with the representation that once characters that live in the city begin to believe in supernatural events, they are given two paths. The first being death straight away, such as in the franchise Final destination or become heroes of the film, such as World War Z (2013)