Paul Wells

Paul Wells' research (2000) Wells got together a small focus group looking at the difference between audience and the horror genre. This focus group involved 12 members of each of the following age groups: 16-25, 26-40, 41-55, and 56-80. He asked them what the earliest horror film they had seen was and what was the most recent horror film they had seen.

This table shows some results:



What conclusions are drawn from Wells' theory?
• The relationship to being frightened changes with age.
• Audiences between 1970s and 1990s are more anaesthetised to explicit special effects.
• Young audiences are aware of artificiality and are becoming harder to shock.

The question we now have to ask is whether Wells' theory is out of date and is it relevant and how reliable is this now? Because horror is always changing e.g. getting scarier, becoming more comedy like rather than scary and it is also becoming more unrealistic is the research still reliable? Wells' focus group also only consisted of 48 people which isn’t enough to draw such conclusions from because you can’t generalise age groups. More people need to be involved in the research in order to make sure that results and conclusions are accurate and more valid.