Research - Audience Report

We created a short questionnaire with the aim of finding out which demographic our target audience should be. The questions focused on age, gender, and people’s opinions surrounding the horror genre, as this was the genre of film we decided to make a trailer for. We distributed this survey to 21 students and teachers, and I will analyse the results we gained to decide what our target demographic should be.

The age range of the people we surveyed was 17-33, with 10 of them being male and 11 of them being female. 5 males and 5 females answered yes to the question “Do you watch horror films?”; this data is shown in the graph below:

This shows that, as horror is quite a divisive genre, our target audience should be both male and female to maximise the amount of people who will want to see our film based on the trailer. I believe we should focus slightly more on females due to the content of the following pie charts:

These graphs show that none of the males we surveyed defined horror as their favourite genre but 2/11 females did, showing that our target audience should be more focused on females as our survey has found that they are more open to the horror genre.

This graph shows that our target audience would be interested in a film similar to ours. Both The Woman in Black and The Ring contain female antagonists and have been suggested by both males and females. Most of these films are supernatural horrors, again suggesting that our film would be well received as it is also supernatural.
These ratings from IMDb users for The Woman in Black show that a younger target audience would be a good choice for our film as those under 18 were the age demographic which gave the film it's best ratings, giving it an average of 7.2 out of 10 stars. This data also shows that we may want to focus more on a female target audience as females rated the film slightly higher than males, and female under 18s gave the film it's highest ratings, giving it an average of 7.5 out of 10 stars, which is 1 star higher than the total average rating for the film.

This graph again shows that people would be interested in our film without us making changes, as the vast majority of people surveyed said they would find a little girl creepier than a little boy in a horror film. This is advantageous for us as the main villain in our film is a young girl.

As we are planning that the film we will be producing a promotional package for will be supernatural, the appeal of our prospective film is again supported by the graphs of questionnaire responses, as these show that supernatural is by far the most popular horror sub-genre for both genders. A higher proportion of females prefer supernatural horrors, showing again we should focus more on a female target audience.

This graph shows that a higher proportion of below 21 year-olds watch horror films, but this may just be due to under 21s making up the majority of people surveyed. Nevertheless, half under 21s said they did watch horror films, whereas only 40% of over 21s said they did.

I think that our target audience should be young, both male and female but with a focus on females under 21. This is due to the findings of our survey, where both genders were more or less equally receptive to horror films, with females being slightly more so. In addition to this, our survey also found that horror films are slightly more popular with younger audiences. Also, as our film will centre on younger characters in a school environment, it makes sense for this type of person to be our target audience.