What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Stuart Hall’s reception theory is the idea that all media texts are interpreted by the viewer, there are different types of audience: Dominant (when the audience agree with the intended meaning), Negotiated (when the audience partially agrees with the intended meaning) and Oppositional (when the audience reject the intended meaning). We thought it would be interesting to see how people perceived our trailer, hence we included questions such as ‘has the female protagonist been portrayed in a positive or negative manner?’ We decided to stick to conventions with a female protagonist who was shown as innocent, hence it was intended that she’d be portrayed negatively: weak and vulnerable. Out of the 9 replies, 1 rejected the encoded meaning, while 4 agreed, the other 4 were unsure. This demonstrates how different audiences interpret text in different ways.

The purpose for a film trailer is to make people want to watch the film, so to see how successful it was at achieving this we asked ‘would you see Lacerate at the cinema?’ We also asked ‘How often do you go to the cinema’, as if a person went to the cinema very rarely, it would be a great compliment that they would go to watch the film. 37.5% of people surveyed said they would watch the film at the cinema, considering 55% only go to the cinema yearly, this is a good sign. Furthermore, 44% of people surveyed only watch horror films rarely, meaning people were impressed with the trailer.

Horror films have established conventions and it’s typically very easy to follow the steps to creating a horror: a supernatural villain, a creepy setting, scary music, a vulnerable protagonist, visual effects, jump scares and gore. In our film we used a demon to ‘haunt’ the protagonist, we used a knife to convey violence, while having an eerie soundtrack in the background, the second half was an intense action sequence which is typical of films in the horror and thriller genres. However, some people still mistook the film as a thriller, granted, our film didn’t contain too much gore (as we wanted to make it appropriate for younger teens). 33% saw the film as a thriller, 11% even saw it as a comedy; perhaps they thought it was a spoof of a horror film. We also asked ‘Does the trailer convey the conventions of the horror genre?’ To which only 33% said yes, this was surprising for us, as we felt we did well to stick to conventions, however upon receiving this feedback,  we think we could have done more to do this, for example using a more eerie location for Summer finding the book. Most (77%) of our audience felt that our film was targeting 15-20 year olds; this is good because we purposely made sure the film was appropriate for the 12 certificate. Genre theory is relevant here; Steve Neale said that ‘genres are instances of repetition and difference’ and that ‘difference is essential’ as repetition alone wouldn’t attract an audience. Relating this to our film, we stuck to conventions somewhat, however these differences set us apart from other horrors.

Finally, we asked our audience to look at the film poster and the magazine cover. There were mixed responses towards the poster, as only 44% of our audience liked it enough to see the film, the same amount said ‘maybe’. This is disappointing as the poster contained all elements of a typical horror poster. We then asked them how clear the links between the parts of the media package were, thankfully 77% said the link was ‘clear to see’