NW ED group - Audience research questionnaire

Purpose

• We wanted to devise a questionnaire that would tell us what appeals to our target audience so we could see what they like to see in a psychological horror film.
• By collecting the results from the questionnaire we are able to change aspects of our sequence to appeal to our audience more so the outcome will be more effective.
• To see if our target audience liked our concept and picked the answers we already decided on or if they thought other aspects would work better for our genre.

Methodology

• We used language that can be understood by anyone, so if they aren't particularly interested in the horror genre they should still be able to understand what we are trying to get across.
• We open the questionnaire with two scaled questions to try and gage the general ideas of the audience and give them options to give them an idea of what our horror sequence could be about. there are further scaled questions throughout the questionnaire.
• Question 3 and 9 require a ranked response which gives us an idea of whether or not our original ideas fit with what our audience want to see or what they expect.
• The 5th question is semantic differential to try and work out what our audience think about the look of our female character and how they would expect her to be as the victim.
• Our 8th question is simply a yes or no response, this gives us a direct answer and should establish what the majority of our audience expect.
• The 6th and 7th questions are open questions which will give us a more detailed response to what our audience is expecting, we can then reflect on this to see of our original idea is in line with the ideas of our target audience.

Questionnaire
We asked the following questions in our questionnaire:

• How important is it to feature the antagonist (killer) in the opening sequence of the film?
• How scary do you find blood used for a murder in a horror film?
• Place a number from 1-4 (1 being the least and 4 being the most) to indicate which inside location would be the most effective in a psychological horror film?
• On a scale of 1-5 (1 being very and 5 being not important) how important is the household location in a psychological horror film?
• How would you expect the female victim to look?
• What stock characters do you expect in a psychological horror film?
• What type of weapons if any do you think the psychopath would have?
• Do you expect the lighting to be dark in a psychological horror film?
• Rank the following titles 1-3, (1 the best and 3 the worst)

Results

• Question 1- 

2/11 thought it was very important to feature an antagonist in the opening sequence
6/11 thought it was quite important to feature an antagonist in the opening sequence
3/11 thought it was not very important to feature an antagonist in the opening sequence
No one thought it was not at all important to feature an antagonist in the opening sequence

We expected this kind of result as many horror films feature the antagonist to introduce them to the narrative in the opening scene.

• Question 2 -

4/11 found the use of blood in horror films very scary
2/11 found the use of blood in horror films quite scary
3/11 found the use of blood in horror films not very scary
2/11 found the use of blood in horror films not scary at all

These results were quite surprising as I was expecting more people to find the use of blood very scary however its obviously not a feature that effects the audience as much as we originally thought. However the use of blood fits to our storyline so we will continue to use it despite not all our respondents finding it scary.

• Question 3-

The results from this question showed that the bedroom and the attic were the most effective locations in the house for a psychological horror film each getting 4/11 for the most effective location, the least was the living room with 6/11 ranking it the least effective. The second most effective location was the hallway with 7/11 ranking it the second most effective location.
These results prove that we have decided our locations well as we will not be using a living room which proved not to be popular, however the attic and hallway did which are our two main locations for the sequence.

• Question 4-

This question proved that none of our respondents thought that the household location in a psychological horror was neither very important or not important at all, with most going somewhere in-between, the graph shows this. The majority tend to go for the less important end which tells us that it doesn't matter if we shoot inside a house or not.
The scale on the graph goes from 1 being very important to 5 being not important at all, as you can tell from the graph no-one had really strong views either way on whether the household location was important or not.

• Question 5-

The results of this question shows that most people expect the female victim to be young, innocent and stereotypical. This is what I had expected from this question as generally that is how the female is portrayed in most horror films. This helped to confirm our initial ideas for the look of our female antagonist.

• Question 6-

As this was an open question, we received a range of answers including: male antagonist, mum and dad, victim and antagonist, a mental person, family members, person expected to be killed, murderers, final girl and psychologically disturbed people.
These answers gave us an insight to what people expect from a psychological horror film, many of them are the types of characters that will be in our sequence so this was a good indication that we will be catering to the needs of our target audience.

• Question 7-

Again with this being an open question there was a range of answers: knife, sword, blunt weapons, scalpels, axe, gun, photographs, drawings, saw, chisel, machete, crossbow and pliers.
Many of these are weapons that we plan on using in our piece, knife came up on almost every questionnaire which is a good indication that its the most suspected weapon and also the main weapon we will be using. It was also useful for some people to include details that can be included in mise-en-scene such as the drawings and photographs as these are also a big part of our production and will create the psychological setting that people are expecting.

• Question 8-

11/11 answered that they did expect the lighting to be dark

This question confirmed our initial thoughts that the lighting should be dark in a psychological horror film as this is stereotypical in most films of this genre.

• Question 9-

Inscription and Obsession were the two favourites, both gaining 5/11 as the best title of the three. Unknown had the worst ratings so that made it easy for us to take out of the three we had thought of, inscription then had the second best votes too making it the most popular title, which we will most likely use for the title of our film.

Evaluation

The most useful questions were questions 5, 7 and 9 as they helped us confirm some of our original ideas as well as give us new ones.
Question 5 was good because all the answers we received let us know that we had the right idea for the characteristics of our female antagonist so we could continue to use the actress we had planned on casting as she fit well with the role.
Question 7 was also useful because it reinforced that a knife is the best weapon to use but it also gave us other ideas and we gained some extra information which agreed with our ideas for mise-en-scene.
And finally question 9 was very useful because it helped us to decide on a title which we can now incorporate into our sequence and think about different fonts, sizes and colours.