Audience Research (Independent)

Before creating my horror film trailer, I complied some information about peoples preferences of horror films in order to create a trailer that would be enjoyed by its audience. While planning the trailer, I wanted to make it different to the current theme of horror movies, which are mainly orientated around gore and sadistic violence. However we wanted to create a trailer that would actually influence the audience, and to do this we decided to use the idea of subliminal messages. The overall response from our targeted audience when compiling information was a positive one with regards to the possibility of a psychological horror film. Most of the audience suggesting that the gore type films were becoming slightly outdated and over-used and a different type of horror film would be interesting to see.

Here is a picture of the questionnaire we gave to our target audience, in total we handed out 20 questionnaires in order to get a large selection of results therefore we were able to make good decisions about the film based on the responses. ---

Although we changed our idea for our trailer along the process of producing it, we still kept the same ideas that the film was going to be of the psychological nature instead of gore, however instead of subliminal messaging we were going to  use the idea of the main character going insane. The film would still  be disturbing without using blood and violence, however we thought the idea would be more realistic and feesable to an audience.

Overall, collecting the audience research from the questionnaire results helped greatly when deciding the type of horror film we wanted to produce. Although we previously had an idea of what kind of trailer we were going to make, the results from the questionnaire suggested we should go ahead with the psychological idea and that differentiating the film from the current market would prove to be a good decision.

Kieran Browne