AN: Target Audience Questionnaire Results

The questionnaire was answered by 10 participants from our target audience of teenagers in the core audience across both genders; however one questionnaire that was handed out wasn't returned and we have been unable to track it down.

The first question we on the questionnaire was "how important is murder in a horror film?" which required the person to rate it's importance on a scale from 1 to 10; the question returned an average of 4.67 with a varied range with the lowest being 1 (not important) and the highest being 7 (quite important). The most common pair of results returned for this question were 5 and 7 receiving three answers each suggesting that our audience prefers some form of murder to establish the film whilst a majority find it not entirely crucial.

The second question asked the participant about "the importance of gore in a horror opening" over a range of 1 to 10; averaged out the results came to exactly 5 with the highest being 8 (important) and the lowest being 1 (not important). the two most common answers were 4 and 7 which each had two answers. these results tell us that the audience for our film are varied in their opinions of gore in a horror opening with some people finding it an important aspect whilst other find it an unnecessary addition; the average opinion suggests that it will not be a detriment to our film as to whether or not we choose to use gore to our opening or not.

The third question gave a range of possible locations for a psychopathic slasher (forest, old/ abandoned building, church, normal house) and asked participants to rank the possible locations. results for this questionnaire also varied however a majority of respondents ranked old/ abandoned buildings and normal houses at 1 or 2 . a normal house received 3 rank 1 responses, this is also true for the old/ abandoned building location; church only received one rank 1 result with forest claiming the last two possible rank 1 answers. The results indicate that the most popular settings we could use would be either an old building or normal house. Our current location of choice is Hamish's house, and based on the results we can either choose to keep it as a normal house or dress it up to appear old/ abandoned.

Question 4 gave a selection of aspects of horror antagonists to rate with the options being: sharp or scruffy, clever or simple, calm or mad, slow or fast this allows us to gauge how we can construct the personality of our antagonist. The first pair returned an average of 1.89 showing with no results being higher than 3, this indicates that the audience prefer a sharper dressed antagonist to a scruffy one. the second pair returned an average of 1.22 showing a very strong reception for a clever antagonist as opposed to a simple minded killer. The third pair gave an average of 2.78 suggesting an indifference to the patience of the antagonist however there is a slight majority preferring a calm and calculating antagonist to a madder one. The fourth pair of results suggests further indifference in reaction to the actions of the antagonist with an average of 3.89. this gives an indication that the audience likes a fast moving antagonist who moves in for the kill efficiently instead of slowly building to their goals.

We then questioned audiences on their opinion of the use of sound design in horror openings by asking them which type of design they preferred either a quiet or a prominent approach with 1 being quiet and 10 being prominent. The results show a preference to quieter sound in an opening with an average of 2.67 and no answers being higher than 5. This informs us that a quieter approach to sound may be more positively received.

Question 6 asked whether or not the participant considered the use of nursery rhymes in horror scary or not, this was used to find out whether or not we could use some form of familiar imagery/ sound in the opening to make the opening more creepy e.g. fairground music. The results show that 78% of the people who answered felt they were whilst 22% felt they were not. this indicates that nursery rhymes and familiar imagery could be used to try and make our opening more sinister and creepy.

The last two questions were open questions asking what people look for in a horror opening and their favourite horror antagonist. For the first a popular response was that of using the opening to build tension and suspense and establishes the theme's of the film and it's antagonist, whilst some more generic results such as scariness suggests we made the question too broad. The second question had two recurring results of John Doe from Se7en and The Joker from the Dark Knight whilst the last results with the exception of one mentioned antagonists also associated with psychopaths meaning that the most popular style of villain for our piece will most likely be a psychopath.