Evaluation - Question #5

How did you attract/address your audience?

One of my film's genres is horror. To find out what things an audience enjoys seeing in a horror film I created a questionnaire. From the results of said questionnaire I added the elements people loved seeing into the opening to my film. For example one of the questions I asked was "In your opinion, what movie-making techniques (eg stings, PoV shots) are most important for a horror film?". Here are a few of the responses: "I've always thought with horror, less is more. The idea of something scary is usually better than just showing something scary. And I think horror films should mostly be normal dramas, but with the characters lives in peril", "Leaving some things slightly off camera, leaving elements to the viewers imagination". I thought these points made were great. So I incorporated these ideas into my film. Throughout the start of the opening I left the main character Jules' face outside of the shots. This was to leave what he looked like to the audiences imagination, which was part of what the people I asked enjoyed about horrors.

Jules with no head in the frame

One of the next questions was "What's your favourite type of horror villain?". I asked this to find out if the typical horror audience would watch my film based on the script I wrote and the type of villain I had included. 'Psychopathic killer' came second in the poll with 36% of the votes only just behind 'zombie' which received 45% of the votes. So it turned out a lot of the audience would love seeing my 'psychopathic killer' in the horror movie.

A later question was "Are you a fan of horrors that include other genres (eg horror-comedy, horror-romance?". I had a strong suspicion that my film would definitely be multiple genres, so I decided to ask this question just in case it was a terrible decision. I turns out that everyone I asked prefers a multiple genre horror film over just a plain horror film. In fact one of my other questions was "What's your favourite horror movie?" and a few people replied with Shaun of the Dead a fantastic example of a successful horror-comedy. Therefore I carried on my idea of a horror-thriller-detective film.