Survey and Results

To help with our project, we made a survey on Survey Monkey which would ask the general public questions about horror films and other genres. The information gathered from this survey would provide more guidance as to what audiences would like to see from a film opening. I used Facebook to help get as many people to take part as possible.

Overall we got 20 responses which we were quite impressed with, considering the short time scale we gave to accumulate results.

First of all, we asked about age, this was to see whether the majority of people taking part in this survey were in our age group, because if not, the results might not be as helpful as our target audience are aged 16-25. Luckily 90% of the participants were in our target audience age group.

We the asked what their favourite film genre was. Although we were expecting horror to come out on top, it was comedy that 60% of people enjoyed the most. This tells us that clearly comedy is a popular genre, and it would be beneficial to us if we incorporated some comedy into our clip, as that is what our target audience enjoy the most.

The next question was about what the most important element of a horror film is. This was a very important question for us as it would give us a huge clue as to what we needed to include in our clip to make it as successful as possible. After looking through the responses, we found that the most frequently mentioned elements were 'suspense' and 'tension'. These are very typical features of a horror and we will make sure we try and create them through camerawork, editing, sound and mise en scene.

Then we asked what people enjoyed most about horror films. By getting audiences opinions, it helps us to create a clip that we know will be enjoyable to watch, as well as meeting the brief given. We found that the responses were quite similar to the question asked before; answers such as 'suspense' and 'anticipation' as well as the obvious 'being scared'. I think that these are easy guidelines to try and follow for our clip and having now asked this question, we are able to create a clip that our audience is more likely to enjoy.

The next question we asked was what people disliked most about horror films.This was an important question as it would tell us what we needed to avoid when planning and creating our clip. Popular answers included 'gore/blood' 'boring/no story line'. Through these answers we now know that to make our clip as enjoyable as possible for our audience, we need to make sure there is a decent story line to keep it interesting, and try to keep blood and gore to a minimum.

We then asked what our audiences favourite horror film was and why. This would help us to see what sub genre people enjoy and what kind of films are the most successful and appealing to our audience. 'woman in black' was a film mentioned a few times which tells us that we might need to research this film and find out what makes it so appealing, in order to make our own clip the best it can be.

Overall, I think our survey has been very successful as it has helped us a lot to see what people enjoy and don't, and what they want to see from a horror film. We will definitely be taking these ideas on board!