Questionnaire
The most important part of producing and distributing a horror trailer is the audience. Without a specific audience our trailer wouldn't be able to sell. With this in mind we conducted a questionnaire in order for us to get a greater understanding of who our specific target audience is. We asked a range of people, both male and female, between the ages of 12 to 60 their opinion of the horror genre and what they liked about it. Here are the results for each question:
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Do you like horror?
As you can see from the pie chart their is a strong consistency with the amount of likes and dislikes from both male and female parties. We can also connote that more males like horror than females, as 60% of the males questioned said they enjoyed it. Whereas 60% of females said that they disliked the horror genre. From the female pie chart we can see that the majority of females dislike horror, compared to the 40% that said they liked it. However the male pie chart shows a complete contrast where the majority of males like horror, compared to the 40% that said they didn't. The fact that more males enjoy horror means we will be aiming our trailer at a more male orientated audience, however we will also include aspects relating to a female audience also. This will allow our trailer to be more diverse and enable us to reach a wider audience.
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What is your favourite sub-genre of horror?
From these results we can connote that zombie is a very popular genre with both males and females alike, scoring the highest amount of votes for both genders. However we can see that thriller is a common like among female audiences, resulting in 36% of the votes. Whereas the male audience didn't find the thriller sub-genre appealing at all, instead they preferred psychological horror which acquired 33% of the votes. The slasher sub-genre seems to be more appealing to male audiences than females, resulting in 25% of males voting for slasher. Whereas only 9% of females said they preferred slasher to any of the other sub-genre's. There is a noticeable lack of interest in the Paranormal sub-genre in both male and female audiences as it only received 8% of the male vote and 0% from the female results. The information we gathered from this question will be very helpful when choosing what sub-genre we will be doing in our trailer. After looking at the results we think it will be more beneficial for us to create a psychological trailer as both genders have some interest in the genre. It also means there is a gap in the market for a psychological horror film as we feel the zombie genre has been overdone recently and we would like to bring a new edge to the market. However, we wont be producing a paranormal horror film as it does not appeal to the majority of the specific audience.
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What are you afraid of?
As we can see from the chart both males and females are afraid of spiders. However it is more prominent in the male results than the females. 37% of females say they are afraid of the dark. This is a complete contrast to the male results as 0% of men said they feared the dark. Also women are more afraid of blood than men as 25% of women agreed they were scared of it, whereas 0% of men admitted to have a fear of blood. More of the male audience said they were afraid of other things not present on the list. The majority of these fears were snakes and heights. Although 0% of women said they were afraid of anything that wasn't mentioned on the list. We can also see that 0% of both male and female participants said they were afraid of ghosts. This information is useful when creating our trailer as it will help us include some of our audience's fears within the clips. We also wont be using the idea of ghosts within our trailer as they are not a popular fear within our specific audience.
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How Long Do You think a teaser trailer is?
As you can see from these results, both males and females agree that a teaser trailer should be between 30 - 90 seconds long. After this amount of time people start to lose interest in the storyline and subsequently end up not watching the film. However 40% of both males and females said that a trailer should be between 1 - 2 minutes long. These people preferred the idea of a theatrical trailer more than a teaser as they enjoyed the idea of being told a crucial part of the film through the trailer. We will be doing a teaser trailer between 30 - 90 seconds long as we want to make sure we appeal to our specific audience. We also don't want to make our trailer too long as we don't want our audience to lose interest and not want to see the film.
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After completing this questionnaire we have developed our understanding of the different things we should include in our trailer. We will make sure we include suggestions from both the male and female participants in order for us to appeal to a wider audience.
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