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Many stories, especially in the fantasy genre, feature an object or objects with some great power. Often what drives the plot is the hero's need to find the object and use it for good, before the villain can use it for evil, or if the object has been broken by the villains, to retrieve each piece that must be gathered from each antagonist to restore it, or, if the object itself is evil, to destroy it. In some cases destroying the object will lead to the destruction of the villain. In the Indiana Jones film series, Jones is always on the hunt for some mystical artifact. |
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The MacGuffin |
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A MacGuffin is a term, popularized by film director Alfred Hitchcock, referring to a plot device wherein a character pursues an object, though the object's actual nature is not important to the story. Another object would work just as well if the characters treated it with the same importance.Hitchcock said that "in a thriller the MacGuffin is usually 'the necklace'; in a spy story it is 'the papers'". This contrasts with, for example, the One Ring (from The Lord of the Rings), whose very nature is essential to the entire story. |
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Deus Ex Machina |
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The term deus ex machina is used to refer to a narrative ending in which an improbable event is used to resolve all problematic situations and bring the story to a (generally happy) conclusion. |
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Red Herring |
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The function of a red herring is to divert the audience's attention away from something significant. Red herrings are very common plot devices in mystery, horror, and crime stories. The typical example is in whodunits, in which facts are presented so that the audience is tricked into thinking that a given character is the murderer, when it is actually another character. |
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