Audience Research Results Analysis - Questions 16-20

Analysing our results: Questions 16 - 20 

Out of the 45 people questioned, 41 of those people said that they believed that music helps add suspense to a horror film/ horror teaser trailer. This particular feedback is very important as we want to include scary music in order really grab our audience. The audience’s agreement that music will help add suspense means that we will definitely have music alongside the action in our teaser trailer, to help create suspense for our viewing audience. With only 4 people saying that they do not believe music helps add suspense to a horror teaser trailer suggests that a minority of horror movie fans deem music to be a very important factor in the experience of a horror film.

 We asked this question as we were considering whether or not to challenge the conventions of a teaser trailer and having high-key lighting as opposed to the traditional low-key lighting. As expected, a majority of our questionnaire responses, 69 per cent, would prefer low-key lighting in a horror film or horror teaser. As our target audience are already horror fans, we trust their opinion in regards to this and we will opt to use low-key lighting. This will essentially capture the essence of the dark horror theme, and correspond with the typical but effective conventions of horror. The 31 percent of people who would prefer high-key lighting could possibly be seeking a change to the traditional horror teaser trailer conventions.

After watching other teaser trailers prior to conducting this research we found that the use of captions, special effects and music enhanced the effectiveness of the teasers we watched. This influenced us to plan to incorporate this into our product, so we asked this question, seeking agreement within the responses. As expected a large majority, 93 percent, agreed that captions, music and special effects enhance the effectiveness of a horror teaser trailer. This has ultimately convinced us to definitely attempt to incorporate all three features in our teaser trailer.

We were aiming to incorporate a gory-psychological hybrid genre for our final products, as we feel this will provide our audience with a greater horror experience. To our advantage, the sub-genres “Gore” and “Psychological” were the majority preference amongst our questionnaire responders receiving a total of 36/45 votes combined. This has given us the confidence to attempt to apply a hybrid genre theme to our teaser trailer and essentially meet the demands of our audience.

In regards to our Film poster, we were aiming to receive some form of response/advice prior to producing it so we asked this question to know which feature to make stand out most for our audience. 30 out of the 40 people questioned deemed the main image as the most important feature on a horror film poster. Only 1 person felt that the quote was the most important feature, and 4 people deemed the typography to be the most important. Despite the underwhelming vote for typography, we will still regard it as one the most important features of our film poster, alongside colours used and the main image when it comes to editing the poster. All these combined, when edited effectively; essentially make a strong horror film poster.