Survey Evaluation

 For our survey we decided that we should ask mostly young adults as we found from researching the horror film industry that teenagers and young adults were the most it was relatively easy to find people to answer our survey for us. We also chose to ask more males than female young adults as from researching the topic we found that more males go to the cinema to watch horror films. We found this also true in middle-classed families and British and Western cultures. We chose to approach this by asking for occupation along with gender and age.

 After asking whether they like watching horror films, we asked which aspects in a horror film that they appreciate most. We chose this question as we found, occasionally some aspects have to be sacrificed for another, e.g. you can either have lots of action, or have an eerie scene. You cannot have both in one scene. Form the results of this question we found that suspense, eeriness and shock value. Also that we should sacrifice action for a more eerie scene and that character exposition wasn’t as important, neither was special effects or darkness. This was a successful question as it told us exactly what we should include at the expense of another. However it could have been improved by having more than 8 aspects to choose from.

 The next question we asked was what their favourite film was. We got a mixed result form this and it seemed people preferred either psychological horror films e.g. ‘Silence of the Lambs’ or supernatural horror films e.g. ‘The Exorcist’. This was useful as it gave us examples of films that we should take into account when creating ours, so we decided to incorporate psychological and supernatural elements into our sequence. This could have been more successful if we had given them a selection to choose from, as it would narrow what films to take into account over other ones. 

 Our next question was finding out which, from a selection of possible one-liners did they think were the best. From the results we found out that ‘In the dark, there is everything to see’ was the favourite, and ‘You can’t escape. It won’t let you.’ Was the runner up along with ‘Sin from the darkness.’ This was extremely useful as it helped us choose which one liner to attach to our opening sequence. This question could have been better by using a better selection method than just writing in a number next to the line they liked.

 After that we asked which horror themes people enjoyed the most. This helped us choose which time period to set our opening sequence as well as selecting which kind of plot they liked most. From the results we found that historic, religious and supernatural themes were most popular. This helped us to decide what time period to 

consider, and what themes to think about, and so was a useful question. Could have been improved by using a better method for selecting favourites.

 Next we asked whether they would like to watch a psychological horror or a ‘slasher’ film. We asked this question to find out whether to have many, less meaningful deaths as in ‘slasher’ films, or to have a few more meaningful deaths as in psychological horrors. In our results we found that the large majority liked psychological horror films more due them being generally scarier and ‘mess with your mind’, and that ‘slashers’ become boring quickly. This was a successful question as it helped us decide what kind of attitude to take towards our opening sequence, and to lay down an enigma instead of showing the audience everything. This question could have been improved by being more detailed about why they preferred either style.

 The next question was finding out which title, out of a possible selection that they liked the most. This was a very useful question as it helped us decide what to name our opening sequence. From the results we found that ‘Scapegoat’ was the favourite, followed by ‘Sorrow Falls’ and ‘Town Comforts’. Since ‘Sorrow Falls’ came second we decided that this would be the name of our fictional location, and chose ‘Scapegoat’ to be our title. This was a very successful question, and only could have been improved by having a better method of selection, as it was very cramped in the answer space.

 The final two questions was what they expected from the protagonist, and what they expected from the antagonist. This was going to help us decide what kind of characters to portray in our opening sequence. These questions were fairly successful as the answers were generally agreeing with each other saying that the antagonist should be clever, and sadistic while out for revenge. While the protagonist should be a ‘sexy woman’, should have depth and have an explanation for their actions. This was good as it gave us good framework to build general characters from. The questions could have been improved by giving choices instead of asking the person to write down what they felt.

 We found our survey very helpful for deciding what to include in our opening sequence and were very pleased with the results that we received. Here is an example of the typical response that we got back: