Target Audience Research

For our target audience research we created a questionnaire as seen above and handed it out to 20 people between the ages 16-35.

Doing a questionnaire is proven as one of the best ways to find out about your target audience for a film, so we put together a survey and asked various members of the public to truthfully answer the questions so we can get a better understanding about how we should market our film and who to.

We concentrated the majority of our questions about horror genres as this is our chosen film genre, through which we found out that initially 6 out of 11 females asked would not want to watch a horror movie, this means that only 5 are willing to watch a horror. Whereas, looking at the male statistics we find that exactly half of the males were willing to watch a horror and the other half preferred not to.

This shows evident that in proportion to the people asked, more females preferred not to watch a movie whereas more males did want to watch a movie; however the fact that the results are so close makes the clarity of the survey unequal.

I decided to further this research into the proportions of male vs. females who watch horror movies by looking at statistic on IMDb. However, even though with most of the movies I looked at there are more males watching, The gap between them is still very close and therefore I believe that targeting to a certain gender would not be a good idea.

The fact that there is not much difference between the males and females shows that perhaps a horror movie does not have a distinct gender demographic however, looking at ages we find that the majority of under 21’s preferred to watch a horror movie whereas it was more popular for the 21+’s to say they didn’t want to watch a horror. 

Thus, it becomes evident that a horror movie should be targeted at a younger/teenage audience.

When asked what people prefer to see in a horror movie a clear majority (60%) said that they prefer supernatural happenings over torture or slasher. This bodes well for us as the main body of our trailer is based on supernatural events occurring.

Relating this pie chart to the common horror movies that showed up when asked about favourite horrors, we found that more ghostly movies like, ‘The Woman in black’, ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘Mirrors’ were more popular than the likes of ‘Saw’ and this shows that perhaps analysing movies with supernatural sub-genres and ghostlike events such as ‘Mirrors’ would be a good idea as this is clearly the more popular option whereas Saw and more gory movies do not appeal to a very large audience according to our statistics. Other films mentioned by those questioned are generally of the supernatural theme rather than torture or slasher.

Finally, it is interesting to find that more people would find a little girl creepier than a little boy in a horror film.

Many successful Horror’s use young girls as a ghostly presence and therefore I believe that the use of a young girl would increase the fear felt by our audience and perhaps allow them to sympathise more with the character and make it more relatable.

Overall, the questionnaire proved very usual as I know have an idea that we should aim our film to a teenage audience perhaps 16-21 therefore making our film a 15 rating. I also believe that our film would be more successful if the main villain character was a young girl who haunted people rather than a male who killed people.