The Maguffin

In nearly every thriller made to date, there is a maguffin. However, if you ask an audience member what the maguffin was in a film they just watched, most would not be able to tell you. But once you know, you'll always be looking for it...

So what actually is a maguffin? Who better than the greatest director of thrillers there was, Alfred Hitchcock, to tell us:

'We have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'maguffin'. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in a story. In crook stories it is always the necklace, and in spy stories it's always the papers.'

In simpler terms, a maguffin is something that provides a reason for all the action, drama, suspense and violence, but is not actually important to the plot of the film.