Horror Magazine Analysis

How and why people enjoy film

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

This film has a even split of male to female viewers, out of the 229 people surveyed, 49% were male and 51% female. This means it is useful to me, as our film isn't particularly aimed at one gender. 32% of the 229 people found out about the film through newspaper reviews, this is a large amount of the group, and it shows that it doesn't always take a multi-million pound marketing scheme to give the film hype, it is often free. The other ways people found out about the film were because of word of mouth, which was at 27%. This shows that if your film is memorable and unique, and you can get people talking about it, then it will be successful. 43% of the audience were convinced to watch the film due to the fact that they'd already read the book. This is building upon an already existing audience, which isn't relevant to our film as Lacerate is a new, original storyline. It is worthy of note that this film had an older audience, with 62% of the audience being over 35. Our film, on the other hand, is aimed at a younger audience. With it being given a 12a rating, young teenagers are allowed to watch the film, but our target audience also stretches to young adults, as they would find interest in the imaginative plot which makes the film stand out.

Let the Right One In

 

This film's genre is horror making it more relevant to our film. Also the age group is fairly similar, with 100 out of the 177 being under 35. There was more males than females watching the film, but there wasn't a substantial divide. The ways in which they found out about the film was similar to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, with many reading reviews or hearing from word of mouth. Once again, this reinforces the fact that it doesn't always take a massive investment to build hype. 18% heard about the film through a trailer shown at a cinema, this would be expensive and for our low-budget, I don't think it would be possible. What is interesting about this film was that what convinced many to watch it was reported as being 'other', this about was a huge 72%. Upon further research, I have  found out that the film was shown at many film festivals, so this 'other' could be because many didn't have a say in whether they saw the film or not. Having the film being shown at a film festival would be a great opportunity to give a large group the chance to review the film, many of which would be influential members of the film community. This leads on to the second most picked reason for the audience watching, 'it received good reviews'. This shows that it is very important that the film itself is good, there is little use in having a film which is marketed heavily, but is poor! Unless it has an already existing audience, bad reviews would put off a lot of people.

 

Conclusion

 

Overall it is interesting to look at these figures, what I found unusual was that despite there being huge investment into trailers, marketing etc. A large group within the audience were convinced to watch the film due to word of mouth and due to them being fans of the series already. This shows that despite working on a low-budget, it is still possible to build hype amongst the audience.

Preliminary Idea for poster

After examining many other horror posters, it became a running theme that the title was positioned at the bottom with a big, unique picture in the centre to stand out. With this in mind I decided to start with my poster by positioning various elements of the poster in their respected sections of the page. Here is the brief plan, nothing here is in any way final, it is simply a starting point.

Trailer Progress after Preliminary Feedback

Upon the feedback we were given, it became an aim to 'mix up' the trailer, making it much more typical of an actual trailer rather than of a short film. To go about this, we removed the opening scene, which we felt was more of a story-telling device than an excitement building tool, removing this would leave more to the imagination of the viewer, the basic plot could be revealed drip by drip rather than in the opening 30 seconds. Other additions included the drum and heartbeat sounds, these create tension and add atmosphere to the film, it is also typical of a horror trailer and it is important to stick to our target audience in order to create the most appeal. Here is our footage, we will take in more feedback and then assess what steps we could take to improve it even more, either way the trailer definitely needs some polishing-off:

Risk Assessment

During the production of our film trailer it was important that we took precautions to maintain a high standard of safety to prevent harm and injury. One of our shots features a road which, on initial inspection seems to be unsafe. However, the road was long enough so that we could safely move away to the side of the road to avoid a collision. We used torches to make sure we could see the path in front of us clearly to avoid potential trip hazards. We needed to acquire a knife as a prop so our teacher made sure all precautions were made with regards to bring it in, when filming we made sure when it wasn't in use, it was kept far away from everyone.

Selection Process