Questionnaire and Results

Molly and decided to create a questionnaire/handout which we asked our friends and family to complete. We did this to get a more complete and refined idea of what people wanted from a thriller, by asking questions like which music they prefer, the content they would expect (e.g action or gore), or more specific things like if they would prefer a male or female protagonist.

These are the results we obtained from our questionnaire above. We have chosen the most relevant answers to put into graphs, as some of them we had already asked in our online survey.

Would you prefer to see a male or female protagonnist / antagonist ?

The graph shows that the majority of people would prefer a female protagonist to a male i.e the one that gets kidnapped, conforming to the age old 'damsel in distress' plot. The majority of people also said they would prefer a male antagonist i.e the kidnapper, however this option was quite closeThe dynamic of weak-female-strong-male is overused, so we are deciding whether to challenge this and surprise the audience by casting a male protagonist or a female antagonist.
However, if this dynamic is what people want to see, and is what would generate the most ticket sales in the real world - it seems counterintuitive to do the opposite.

What kind of music would you like to see in the opening of a (psychological) thriller?

These results show that the majority of people chose suspenseful music that builds up, with most of the people that chose it being female. For us, this is a good answer as we were leaning towards making this choice for music anyway. Many people didn't know what contrapuntal music even meant, but after telling them how it was happy/cheery music placed within a scary/suspenseful scene - most were enthused and said that would be a good choice. These two favourites suggest to us that maybe we could employ both into our opening, careful not to have too much of a clash of music however. Eerie children's' music was the third choice, an outcome that relieved us because we feel sometimes this type of music with a horror scene is overused. Classical got no votes, but it wasn't an option we were leaning towards anyway.

What would you like to see in a thriller?

The most common option circled here is 'twist' which is something me and Emma both agree makes, most of the time, an interesting and thought provoking film. 'A sense of being followed' and the general 'moody scenes' choice were second. These are two things you could expect from a thriller, especially a psychological one. It is interesting that the 'car chase' was chosen 80% by males, and being joint third, shows that a lot of males that we asked thought this was a key concept that a thriller needed. Violence and gore were less popular and chosen mostly by males, with gore conceding the least votes - 1, and 100% male.