In order to research my question, I had to figure out how to narrow my parameters. While it would be really interesting to find out what scares people the most about images, there's simply too many flavors of horror to do this. So, I've narrowed my research specifically to what monster design scares the most people. This means no scary little children, no psychotic killers, or anything of that nature. If I'm wanting to create horrifying demons in my webcomic, I think researching monster design is the path that will help me the most.
The way I've decided to go about this is that I'll take a few of my friends or co-workers and show them a series of images. These images will show different common elements I've noticed while researching monster designs. The participants will rate the elements on a scale from one to ten, one being not scary, and ten being terrifying.
I know that horror is also very subjective, so I'll review the results once the surveys have been completed and ask why the participant may have rated one attribute higher than another. I'll probably use Survey Monkey to make the survey, so that it's easily accessible to my participants.
Once the results are in, I'll average out which elements got the highest scores, and create a monster design based on those elements.
