Group Audience Research Questionnaire and Feedback

Purpose:

From the questionnaires we aimed to discover:

• What our target audience's expectations are for a supernatural horror film
• What their general tastes and preferences are and what they find most effective in regards to supernatural horror (e.g. Do they prefer a visible antagonist?)
• What they believe would be best in our own production and whether they support the decisions we've already made (essentially testing our concept)

Methodology:

• We opened our questionnaire with some introductory remarks to outline the purpose of the research and investigation to our audience.
• The terminology we used was not especially simplified. Our production will have some violence and prosthetics in it that would be more appealing to the core horror audience of 15 to 24, who are more likely to understand the terminology relevant to horror
• Our first two questions were used to gauge the participant's taste in supernatural horror, and, this being a separate part of the essay, we used both an quantitative and qualitative question
• The first being a circle box that estimates the frequency of a participants supernatural horror viewing and the second being an open question regarding the participant's favorite supernatural horror movie, which gives a more specific idea of the participant's tastes
• The third question required a scaled response and focused on ideology within our target audience, specifically gender
• The fourth question utilised semantic differential to judge what kind of atmosphere and style our audience likes in regards to supernatural horror
• The fifth question was a circle box that focused on the preferred time of day a supernatural horror movie should take place in
• The sixth question was qualitative and is used to discover what presentation of an antagonist people find most effective.

Questionnaire

Shown to the right is an example response to our questionnaire. We asked the participants to fill out the following questions:

• How often do you watch supernatural horror?
• What is your favorite supernatural horror film?
• How important is it to have a female protagonist in horror?
• Indicate your preferred style of horror.
• What time of day is most effective for supernatural horror?
• Do you think the antagonist should be visible in supernatural horror? Why?

Results

 Question 1 -

• 8 out of 12 people said that they almost never watch supernatural horror.
• 4 out of 12 said they watch supernatural horror at least once a year.
• This result was expected as supernatural horror is a very specific sub-genre, and although it is currently in fashion there are still relatively few well known films that follow this sub-genre. 

Question 2 -

• All the appropriate responses listed one of just four films as their favorite supernatural horror film.
• These were Insidious (Wan, 2010), The Conjuring (Wan, 2013), The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) and Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982).

Question 3 -

• This question saw a variety of responses and at least one response for every option given.
• Half of those asked replied that it is not important to have a female protagonist in horror.
• Only 4 responded saying that it was very or slightly important.

Question 4 -

• Again, there was a significant amount of variety in the responses to this question.
•  The option with the most responses to the first part of the question was option 1 with 5 people saying that they prefer supernatural horror to have a grounded setting. 
• For the second part of the question the most responses were for option 5, that a supernatural horror film should have a dark atmosphere.

Question 5 -

• All of the responses to this question stated that the most effective time of day for supernatural horror is late in the day.
• This came through with 5 out of 12 stating midnight was the most appropriate time, followed by both Twilight and Evening with 3 responses each. 
• Nobody thought that sunrise or midday were the most effective times for supernatural horror to take place.
  

Question 6 -

•  The short answer to this shows that 8 out of 12 people thought that the antagonist should not be visible in supernatural horror.
• Only 4 out of 12 thought that the antagonist should be visible to the audience.
• The longer responses varied in approach, with the majority stating that not having the antagonist shown creates more suspense.
• One response stated that the audience should see the antagonist as it gives a focus for their fear.

Evaluation

 This data is fairly useful for our project, although there are a couple of results we cannot take into account for purely logistical reasons.

The first question told us that among our target audience, very few people regularly watch supernatural horror. We feel this can be interpreted in two ways.

• The first way is that they are not very interested in supernatural horror, or even the horror genre as a whole.
• The second is that there may not be many supernatural horror films that appeal to the group we tested, in which case we could try to cater our style to appeal more to our target audience than most supernatural horror films do.

We found the results from the second question encouraging as we have been using some of the films stated by the participants as influences for our opening. We are trying to create a style not unlike The Conjuring in terms of colour and sound.

The 5th question has presented us with a dilemma. All the participants in our survey stated that later in the day is a better setting for a supernatural horror film, however due to the time constraints of the church we have hired we can only film during the day. We hope to try and use either after effects or just premiere to apply a grade to the opening which will give a sense of darkness, despite the opening being set in the day. Of note here is that we are not trying to use VFX to create a day for night look, but are just trying to darken the scene a little to give the sense of mystery and suspense present in nighttime scenes.

We feel that in some cases our reference to supernatural horror may have led some answers astray, and think that instead we could have used just horror in general or paranormal horror. This wording problem may have influenced some of our results, particularly for question 2.

We also feel that the group we gave our surveys to were not very interested in the horror genre, and that this may have effected some of our results too.

However overall we believe that some of the information we have collected will be very useful in the final stages of planning our opening sequence.