For the first part of my audience research, I gathered secondary research by undertaking a Google search using search terms such as ‘horror film audience’ and ‘horror film audience statistics’. One website (http://temple-news.com/tag/horror-film/) said that “Recent high-grossing horror movies all had predominantly female audiences” (taken from ‘Horror Films... And The Women Who Love Them!’ – Christine Spines, 2009). This article also revealed that now the film industry has noticed that horror film fans are predominantly female, they have began to make horror movies geared specifically to women.
On website fanpop.com, I took a random sampling of 20 of the ‘fans’ of horror movies, and looked at their profiles.
1. Female, 14 years old
2. Male, 18 years old
3. Female, 14 years old
4. Female, 15 years old
5. Male, 17 years old
6. Female, 19 years old
7. Female, 17 years old
8. Female, 14 years old
9. Female, 16 years old
10. Female, 15 years old
11. Female, 18 years old
12. Female, 31 years old
13. Female, 13 years old
14. Male, 17 years old
15. Female, 54 years old
16. Female, 15 years old
17. Female, 14 years old
18. Male, 15 years old
19. Male, 22 years old
20. Female, 19 years old
15 out of 20 (3/4) of these fans were female, compared to only 5 (1/4) male. The female sampling ranged in age from 13 years old to 54 years old, and the male sample ranged from 15 to 22 years old.
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/do-you-like-horror-movies/
In “What Spooks the Masters of Horror?” Jason Zinoman states:
“One of the great things about childhood is how easy it is to access the distinct delight of being scared out of your mind. Adults just have more trouble getting goosebumps.” Perhaps this is why so many viewers are younger? In my sampling, the mean of the ages is 18.85 (19) which appears significantly higher due to the anomalies 54 and 31. However the average age from my sampling is 14/15. This may seem young as many horror films are 15’s and 18’s, so this just goes to show that younger children (female dominated) are becoming the most frequent viewers of horror films.
This article then invites students (13 and older) to comment on horror films. Some comments included are:
“Best ones are the ones that make you jump, keeps you guessing, and sometimes a little gore. (If it’s too much gore, it makes you sick.)”
“I think that the better horror movies are not the scariest ones, but the ones that build up the most suspense without giving away too much. This allows the viewer to put in his/her intuition to play a part in the guessing game that occurs throughout most of the movie.”
“I suppose I learned a lot from the development of that essay, but the most important value I still embrace is that I realized why Psycho is considered the pioneer of Horror movies.”
“This is what I like about these movies: the unexpected, the suspense, the surprise.”
“Good horror movies are characterized as: “movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, disgust and horror from viewers.”
I then went on www.amazon.co.uk and searched for different horror films, then looked at the ‘What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?’ section. On every occasion, four different horror films of similar sub-genres appeared, with an option below to ‘Explore similar items’. This gives an indication that fans of certain horror films also like other horror films, so it would appear that fans of horror films tend to like most films of the genre, rather than just one off’s.
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