Paul Well’s Research into Horror Audience

Priyanka Solanki

• Paul Well conducted a small focus group study involving 12 members of each of the following age group; 16-25, 26-40, 41-55, 56-80.

• He asked the participants about what horror movie was the first, and last they had seen.

• Predictions; some predictions we made were that the younger groups may be more up to date with horror movies where they are more likely to have watched all the new horror movies out, whereas the older generation are less likely to have watched the recent movies, and may have watched older movies such as Dracula.

• Conclusion; The relationship to being frightened changes with age. Audiences between 1910’s and 1990’s are more anaesthetised to explicit special effects/ numbed by special effects. Young audiences are aware that horror movies are artificial and are becoming harder to shock.

• One of the weakest about this research is that its hard to generalise. This is because the total number of participants used is only 48 people, meaning this is a small amount out of the rest of the population.