Appying thoeries of horror to my film

MacGuffin

This is a plot device which takes the form of a goal, a desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation. The MacGuffin's importance to the plot is not the object itself, but the effect it has on the characters and their motivations.

Alfred Hitchcock was a common user of the MacGuffin, and he coined the term back in the days of his film The 39 Steps.

He explained his meaning of the term at Columbia University in 1939:

"It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin'. The first one asks, 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well,' the other man says, 'it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers, 'Well then, that's no MacGuffin!' So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all."

Famous examples of MacGuffins in film include:
  • The mysterious briefcase that glows a golden glow when opened in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction
  • The 'Ring of Power' in Peter Jackson's film adaptions of Tolkien's novel trilogy; The Lord of the Rings.
  • The Death Star plans in George Lucas' Star Wars


I plan to employ a Russian Doll as a MacGuffin to advance the nature of my
short film's plot. Like Hitchcock, I wish to use the MacGuffin to draw attention to how Matryoshka will in fact be not how it appears on the surface.  The film is far more complex as the audience will initially think - the use of the Russian doll is a representation of the protagonist's Multiple Personality Disorder, and it will also provide the film's intrigue and eponymous title; 'Matryoshka' is synonymous for 'Russian Doll.'

Tzvetan Todorov's Theory of Equilibrium

Todorov's theory refers to how the events of a film is ordered, when the equilibrium is at the beginning at the film, and after disruption and resolution, the film ends with a new equilibrium.


 
Although, there seems to be some level of this in my film, the audience will gather a sense of unbalance and disorientation as the events happening in the film are in unchronological order. The film starts with a shot that occurs in the climax, foreshadowing what will happen, and the film's ending scene happens months before all of the events in the film. There are also a few flashbacks used, which are conventional to the psychological horror genre.

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