Audience Research

As a whole I found from my research through a questionnaire that actually the things found in zombie horror may be generic but the audience that enjoys zombie horror seem to enjoy the same old generic aspects. If it wasn't for the generic style of these aspects then zombie horror would not be it's self and certainly would not make it personal to the viewer.

Obviously as seen from my research the most expected from a zombie movie is death, well of course it wouldn't be zombie horror if some people didn't die. Though the options were rather usual to the genre so these responses were expected.

We also included some rather basic questions to see what kind of people were in this audience. Turns out that the age range we was looking at is who mostly watch zombie horror films.

We asked about point of view and the responses seemed rather positive and they seemed to feel as if it is not used often and could be rather effective.

Of course the question of how you are infected is always important when making a good zombie film. It is probably the most important aspect. Turns out that zombie audiences rather enjoy the usual infection via biting.

What makes a good horror movie? Apparently good story line, that is interesting and has realistic aspects to it and danger. This helps a lot to ensure that we add these to our horror opening to captivate people to be our audience.

It seems as though zombie horror is rather favourable by people and is enjoyed by audiences but is not favoured over supernatural horror.

This was a rather interesting part of my research, even though in other questions people would say they expect and enjoys the generic aspects of zombie horror they rather contrast themselves when asked what they don't like about zombie movies, saying they do not like the generics.

Often people feel as though it will be better if the zombie problem is not fixed. It seems that no way out also interests audiences as well.

We explored the possibility of crossing fears in our horror, so we asked how people feel about clowns, the reactions were rather mixed. Obviously there were mixed opinions about jump scares as well, as people either enjoy them or not but we felt we should still ask for thoughts.

This was interesting too. The fact that people do not want films to be the same all the time yet in other questions they answer with generic answers to our questions.

The most expected characters for a zombie film happens to be ones who get scared by the zombies and freak out around them. This means that when creating our own horror opening we can have a larger effect on the audience by having the characters as scared of the zombies as they are so that the may relate to them. Of course we now also know how strong to make the zombies. It seem that fairly strong zombies are rather terrifying to audiences.

We felt as though maybe having an animal companion could be something that is explored as there is never really any animal friends within zombie horror films. Seems like a good idea to audiences and is something we can include in our opening.
Obviously zombie fans do not seem too wild on the idea of having people being immune to the zombie virus.

Seems as though females are preferred, perhaps because of there mostly being strong male characters over females, so perhaps audiences would like a change. However other than this there is a divide in ages so it seems as if any other ages are rather equal.

Weapons seem to be the same things as always so there seems to be no extreme problem with finding props.

I found that this questionnaire was rather useful to us as a group as it shows how even though audiences would like new things within zombie horror they also rather enjoy the stereotypical aspects of it as well. So perhaps it would be rather useful for us to explore these new ideas and include them in our horror opening.