Paul Wells conducted focus group research with 48 people divided into four age groups ranging from 16-80 years old. He asked participants about the first and last horror movies they had seen to understand how being frightened by horror movies changes with age. Younger audiences were predicted to be more up-to-date with recent horror movies, while older generations were less likely to have seen recent films. However, the research had a weakness since the small sample size of 48 people made it difficult to generalize the findings to the broader population.

1. Paul Well’s Research into Horror
Audience
Priyanka Solanki

2. • 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.

3. • 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.

4. • 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.

5. • 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.