Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used Red Herrings in their mystery stories, and the technique, like most, made the jump to film in the 20th century. The History of Red Herringsįalse leads started to become known as “Red Herrings” in the early 1800s when an English journalist named William Cobbett used the term to compare the media’s premature reporting of Napoleon’s defeat to the practice of using smelly fish to distract hound dogs from chasing rabbits.īut while Cobbett gets credit for the origin of the term itself, authors and storytellers have been using false leads to surprise audiences since they started telling stories in the first place. So, if the Red Herring is a gun and it distracts you from the actual weapon (which is a knife), it never has to be fired for the plot device to be used effectively. Unlike Chekhov’s Gun though, Red Herrings don’t require a payoff. Much like Chekhov’s Gun, Red Herrings hinge on expectations. If you don’t notice them until it’s too late, that means they’re working well. Red Herrings function on the same level, distracting characters from the larger questions or prevent audiences from predicting the outcome of the story. While the magician is prompting you to look at something shiny in his left hand, he’s carefully hiding the multi-colored scarf up the sleeve of his right. Red Herrings are a bit like magic tricks - they work best when you don’t realize what’s really going on. More info coming soon | Remind Me Why Red Herrings Work And it doesn’t matter if the use of the Red Herring is intentional or unintentional if it misleads, purposefully or not, it’s a red herring. In fact, Red Herrings can be used within a story to mislead the characters or by the writers themselves to mislead the audience.Ī Red Herring can be just about anything - a character, a piece of information, a physical object, an event, or even an element of the filmmaking. The mystery, thriller, and horror genres have always been rife with Red Herrings, but nowadays you could work one into any kind of story to distract from a big reveal or revelation. It’s anything that misleads or distracts from the larger question or mystery at hand. In storytelling, a Red Herring is a false clue. Not a fish, that’s for sure! There’s actually no such species, so the name of this plot device is itself a bit of a Red Herring.
Plot devices are storytelling techniques writers can use to move the plot of a story forward in some way.
More Plot Devices: Everything You Need to Know About MacGuffins What is a Plot Device?
Let's dig into this very popular plot device, exploring what it is, where it came from, and how you can use it to write better screenplays.
Red herring fallacy definition movie#
Smell something fishy? It's probably a Red Herring.Įver gotten to the big reveal of a movie and wondered to yourself, “How did we get here? How on Earth did I miss that huge clue?” Well… it’s probably because the writer used a tried-and-true plot device called a Red Herring.
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