Killer Klowns from Outer Space Research

Unit 6: Critical Approaches to Creative Media Products

Defining Media Audiences and Creating Products for Specific Audiences

Killer Klowns from Outer Space Research

Task 1

Quantitative Audience Research

Killer Klowns is a Sci-Fi, Horror comedy film made in 1988. My personal opinion on it is that back when it was released, it might have been somewhat of a decent film, but nowadays, the only reason you would ever watch it is to confirm how bad it is, OR if someone makes you watch it (e.g teacher.).

It has average reviews on IMDb, scoring a 6.1 out of 10 stars, with 23,282 total votes. On rottentomatoes, it surprisingly has a good score - 71% in the tomatometer reviews and an average 59% of 42,853 people liked it. It is safe to say that these reviews aren't critical at all, most of them being biased - people liked how bad the film was, giving it a good score, the best possible score, which pretty much makes the reviews and votes invalid in my opinion. Or does it...

Killer Klowns is by many considered a bad movie, in the sense that the makers know it is bad, and make fun of it. One of its genres is horror, and I literally did not know this until my teacher told me, half-way through the film. I'm pretty sure that tells a lot.

Although the film was so bad, the profit it made was good. Killer Klown's budget was only roughly $2 million, and in the opening weekend, according to IMDb, it made $2,6 million. By October in the same year, this film has made $41 million in profit, and overall, in the same year it was released, it made roughly $46 million in profit, meaning it was a success.

In conclusion, Killer Klowns from Outer Space was, somehow, a success. There will be a 3D sequel, in 2018, and I will watch it depending on the ticket price (I probably won't watch it anyway.)

Qualitative Audience Research and Audience Classification

For qualitative research, I created two surveys, asking the audience about their general opinions about the film, as well as their opinions on a Killer Klowns themed game. Here are the links for both of the surveys.

Game

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/C79XGGB
Film
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CCVZ6RK

The overall conclusion that I got from the survey responses is that people either loved it or hated it, there's almost no in-between. People that enjoyed the film generally though that it felt into the humour category rather than horror, and almost all agree that a Killer Klowns game can be a good concept; as you can probably conclude, it also goes the other way - people that disliked the film were more critical about it and consider it as a complete failure in the horror department, all agreeing that the further away from the plot, the better the Killer Klowns game concept would be.

For audience classification, I used two very simple questions asking age and gender of the people taking the surveys. Gender had no correlation with the opinions about the film; although, age did - older people (adults) find the film to fall into more of a humour genre rather than horror. Most of them acknowledge that it is an awful film, but also understand why people would like it. Most of the young adults and teenagers who answered the survey just simply hate the film and any possible game concept, although, some of them see why other people would enjoy it.

Quantitative results, while they can be very vague since most people just rate films out of 5, I did find some in-depth reviews of the film, acknowledging the humour in it, as well as critiquing everything else wrong with it. But in general, quantitative research is more about numbers and percentages, meaning it's less detailed than qualitative research. Qualitative results are and were more useful for my research, since the information I get from people is more detailed, and not only that, since I made surveys, I get the exact information I need - which is going to help me develop my game.