What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We screened our horror trailer to a class of media students aged between 17 and 19. The majority of

them were male, with some female too. I thought this was a good selection of people as it

represented the main group of horror movie viewers according to my audience research.

Our trailer was screened twice; the first time for people to comment on the obvious factors

that they liked or disliked and the second time for them to pick out parts in more detail that they

either thought worked or didn’t. After the trailer had been shown twice, we asked for everyone’s

feedback on our trailer and found out what worked well and what didn’t work so well.

Starting with the strengths, we found that most people commented on our use of statistics

and rhetorical questions. We found a true statistic that stated that one in twelve women have been

stalked at some point in their lives. We found this to be quite a shocking fact, so thought it would be

good to include.

Many people agreed with this; true statistics in horror movies make the horror and ‘shock’ factors a

lot higher. This also brought in the feeling of secrecy; not many people would know or realise the

extent of stalking and so it’s creepy. We got a lot of comments on the shots including the killer’s

finger crossing out his victim’s names with blood.

They thought this was effective and eerie. We thought that as well as being creepy, it also helps the

audience members understand what’s going on and what the killer is up too. We got a lot of

comments on our use of shots. People liked the establishing shot of the college and the canted

angles used on a lot of shots. This was to steer away from being ‘samey’ and boring and for the

audience to also be able to experience the happenings through the eyes of the killer or the victims.

The editing of fading between shots kept the continuity and helped the trailer flow. Alongside our

shots, people liked our use of sounds. The way the music fit perfectly complementing the shots, the

way the heartbeat gradually comes in and picks up pace to build tension at the end and the use of

sound effects on certain scenes, for example the locker scene.

Moving onto weaknesses, a lot of people commented on the snicker wrapper shot. Some people

thought it was irrelevant and didn’t understand its importance in the trailer.

We wanted to use it to represent the final girl going and the fact that nothing and nobody was left in

the college. We got a lot of comments on our final shot of the killer at the very end of the trailer. A

lot said it wasn’t scary enough and the build up to it wasn’t big enough.

I think we could have picked a better shot to finish on with a better sound effect. Another piece of

feedback we received was about the fact that our trailer was often funny at times, instead of scary. I

think this could have been because some of our killer shots weren’t as scary as they could have

been. However, my argument is that the people who analysed our trailer are friendly with the guy

who played the killer in our trailer, and so they find the idea of him being serious, funny.

If I was to change my trailer to make it better, I would probably choose another shot to represent

the final girl going, rather than the shot of the snickers wrapper. I would also re-film a few of the

shots of the killer to make them a lot scarier than they are. I would completely scrap the final shot

and find a shot that’s terrifying to finish on. Giving more time, we would have liked to have found a

really loud ‘bang’ to finish up with on the final shot too. Had we have had more time to improve our

trailer; I would have definitely listened too and considered a lot, if not all of our audience feedback.

My reasons for this would be that our feedback was given to us by a group of people that are from

our target audience. They fit the generic age and gender specifications fitted with the most ‘popular’

group of horror film viewers.