Research Rationale

When moving onto research for my horror trailer, poster and magazine cover I began to think about the target audience I wanted to aim my products at. Upon further thought I discovered the ‘bbfc’ age rating of 15 was most suited to both the genre and me, as I would be able to show more scenes of violence/horror and be able to reach many people from this age group. For my Research into horror films I will be creating four Blog posts. Two of the posts will be on marketing research and the other two on Audience research.

The first marketing research I will be doing is a famous horror quotes blog post; this will help me to see what elements are used to draw an audience in and how these iconic lines are marketed. For this blog post I will create an online moodboard that incorporated the original line and the effect it had. For the second market research I will be looking at the villains/monsters of horror in the recent years, and assessing how effective they were. For this blog post I will need to choose three too four horror movie villains and the analyse them. From this research I can see how commercially horror films were in comparison to how scary, likable or unlikable the villains were.      

For my audience research I will be doing an audience reaction video, where in which I will be showing 3-4 people (in my target audience) some trailers for horror films, I will then ask for their opinions on the trailers. This will help me to analyse what parts of the trailer my target audience finds most effective and I can also see how my audience react physically to certain horror themes. For this I will need a camera, screen recording and volunteers in my age range. For the last blog I will be creating a documentary styled video about fear, this video will feature lots of people in my age range answering the question “what scares you?” And “why does it scare you?” From this I will be able to determine how many people find certain things scary and how this can apply to my horror film. I will also be able to see what horror sub-genres apply to the most common fears. The equipment I will need for this will be a camera and volunteers.

Overall I think my research will help me to understand how the genre of horror can effectively be marketed and how it can be suited for a modern audience in the age range of 25 upward.