A General Look on the Impact of Turkish Horror Movies: An Exploratory Study on the Opinions of Youth on Horror Movies

Abstract

This study aims to examine young Turkish university students’ perceptions on horror movies and the impact of this genre on them. Also, this study aims to gain an understanding of the role of makeup and special effect makeup in horror movies for this particular audience. An exploratory survey was conducted with 1,000 randomly selected participants 18 years and older who were students studying at five universities in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Findings suggest that 70.4% of the respondents prefer watching supernatural horror films where the djinn was reported to be the most feared religious horror character; 86.4% of women and 65.8% of men reported supernatural events as scary. With regard to the importance of makeup in horror movies, 67.1% females and 53.9% males reported that makeup in horror movies was very important, where 26.9% preferred blood as a special effect, 51.1% reported that hand-based makeup was more acceptable, and 65.4% indicated that PC-supported makeup would never replace hand-based makeup. These findings suggest that although there is a potential inclination to watch the horror movie genre, which is a very new genre in Turkish cinema as well as the makeup and special effects used in horror movies, specifically djinn makeup appears to be of importance for the young Turkish film audiences.