Product Research - Successful types of Horror

On imdb (Internet Movie Data-Base) there is a voting system whereby you can vote your favourtite film. The online horror movie list shows us, essentially, what the are the most influential horror films.

The films number 1 and number 3 in the listing above, Phsyco and The Shining, are classic 'slasher' horror films, similair to what we are portraying.  They each earnt $32million and $22million respectively.

Below is the opening line from the article on Wikipedia entitled 'Slasher Film':

Slasher film is a sub-genre of the horror film genre typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a chainsaw or scythe.

What can we not include - Further Product Research

    Some of the aspects that we would like to have included would have most noticeably been the extensive use of special effects. I would have been interested in trying out the gore effects of many films, but we unfortunately do not have the resources to make this possible. To substitute for this, we have decided to make a high tension, darkened, horror film as therefore special effects will not be needed, as the darkness would cover up these needs.

    A track we was looking to include in our production (Muse - Look in) starts off with a good, slow build up, which creates tension, that would have been ideal for our production – as seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GoGXdInTu0.
    However, due to copyright, I am unable to use it, as gaining permission is extremely difficult and in most cases would be declined. I found this out by researching copyright laws, which lead me to a fellow blogger @ http://www.school-video-news.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=306:copyright-issues-when-using-music-in-videos&catid=33:copyright&Itemid=51.

    To get around this we will have to use copyright-free music which we can purchase from various websites such as http://www.nvmdigital.com/nvmusic/library/mp3frameset.html

Comparison between the two trailers

Old	New
No adverts at the start	Introduction includes who made the production
Long scenes	Quick short clips
Title repeated 3 times throughout the trailer	At the end
No quote	Quote
Purely scenes of the film	Part of a home video, mix with the film
2minutes 33seconds	1minute 30seconds
No special effect	Partial but many special effects

Obviously we would want to copy the conventions of the newer trailer so we will include our production name and logo at the start of the trailer. Our film will not have scenes that are too long but clips on the same scene but keep changing the viewers view of the situation. We will have a viewing of a quote. I feel a famous quote that most people could associate with would be ideal. Our trailer will contain part of a home video as a number of notable films. We will also not have too long a trailer and not many special effects.

Secondary Audience and Product Research

Adam and I have been doing some research into what the audience would like to see in the horror other than what we have gathered from doing our own research.

We found the website AccessScience on the 19th September via Google and this is the link we used:

http://www.accessscience.com/studycenter.aspx?main=18&questionID=5338

The following ideas have been quoted from this page:

• "Horror films are designed to elicit strong emotional reactions from viewers, including fear and dread"
• "Violent entertainment appeals primarily to males"
• "People rarely view horror films alone"
• "When humor accompanies the film, emotional reactions are milder"
• "When the violence is too real, when cues to its unreality, like music or film editing, are removed, violent entertainment loses much of its appeal."

Conclusions from the questionnaire

The following conclusions can be drawn from the questionnaire and from Adam and my conversation:

·        Our target audience is 18-25

·        The target audience is likely to go to the cinema once a month

·        The horror genre is likely to have the most people turn up

·        Our killing weapon will be a pitchfork

·        Our soundtrack will contain some fast paced music and contain some small amount of lullaby music

·        The style of killer we will have will be a grounds man. This being because he will be an ordinary man and grounds men use pitchforks.

·        Dark lighting will be used to build tension.

Adam Rustoms reply to my email in the post below