The narrative secret you can learn from horror movies

Photo by Xin on Unsplash

It’s common to hear people say it’s important control the narrative and it’s easy to believe them, but I bet if you think about it—and you may have already done this—it’s not so easy to figure out what the heck they really mean.

What is the narrative?

We all know it has something to do with stories, but…what? And how do you do it in your daily life? How do you do it in your work? How do you do it in your writing? How do you do the kind of storytelling that is the key to unlocking the super influential magic that you see and the leaders and the authors and the storytellers we all admire?

The most important thing you have to understand is the role of a narrative. Here are just a few examples that make it pretty clear. There is a difference between “the narrative,” which you could call “The Big Story,” and the smaller stories you’re going to tell that help to support it.

So here’s the thing: the narrative device it’s not a story. It is the story. It’s the story within which all other stories will nest, the filter to sort everything else into something that makes sense.

The scary thing about narrative

Let me show you something simple. Scary simple. One of the most accessible lessons on the difference between the Big Story and a little story comes from an unlikely source: horror movies. When you look at what makes a horror movie work, you recognize that the scary thing the movie is about doesn’t have to be happening on screen in order to create frightening conditions.

Consider classics—the ones that go down in history: Halloween, Jaws, and The Blair Witch Project. One of the innovations that John Carpenter used to great effect, was the simple narrowing of a scene. As the main character goes about her day, the shot is always framed in such a way that you can’t see much of what’s around her. Because you can’t see if someone is coming, the anxiety in every scene ratchets up.

In Jaws, the shark rarely appears on screen. Just the rippling water is enough to instill the fear of what might be there below the surface.

Both of those movies rely on a good setup to create a narrative. Once that’s set up, any mundane story that plays out on screen takes on a shade of fear. You naturally interpret the small stories to fit them somewhere within the Big Story.

The Blair Witch Project might be my favorite example. Literally nothing scary ever happens on screen and yet the movie terrified audiences when it was new in theaters. You can guess what made it work so well. The narrative created at the start of the movie suggested to viewers that something scary had happened, and that what they were about to see was pieced together from “found footage.” The story starts with a few minutes of ghost stories, creating the legend of the Blair Witch, and all the bad things that had happened in those woods. That’s enough to set viewers up to be scared of almost anything they see in the woods. And that’s how a movie in which the scariest things are, no kidding, a few piles of rocks, some stick figures, the sounds of sticks snapping, and a guy standing in a corner facing the wall, scared us out of $250 million at the box office.

When you tell people a Big Story—when you create a narrative—you set them up to understand ordinary events, other things they read, other things they watch on television, and other stories people tell, in a way that fits your narrative.

Think about this: how would people have to see the world in order for them to come around to your way of thinking?

If you were a shampoo salesman, what story would you have to tell so that whatever arose in somebody’s life they would think that the solution to their problems, the quickest path to their biggest wins, would be cleaner hair? If people were thinking along those lines, opportunities as a shampoo salesman would doubtlessly be much higher.

That’s the power of a narrative—it makes people interpret the world according rules the storyteller constructs. A narrative will tell you things like “when you see X think Y.” Obviously, you won’t actually say those words, but you will construct a narrative such that the instruction is embedded in the story.

What if I had a pill that could make you a better storyteller?

If you doubt the power of narrative, Another example of the power of a narrative is the placebo effect. That’s a story you tell yourself and it has real, measurable impact. Why is it that an identical painkiller will work better with the name brand on the bottle? Why is it that wine poured from a heavier bottle will taste better? It’s because of the story you fit those facts into and the expectations that sets up.

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Let’s bring this around to something a bit more like what you might be trying to do.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice, he was creating a narrative, a Big Story. That eloquent sentence wasn’t just a nice idea, it was a framing device so that whatever happens, even when you see rampant injustices in the world, you have a way to understand them. Now when you see that injustice, you’ll see it as an aberration. You’ll see it as something that should be corrected. Even more, it’s something that will be corrected. You’ll see the world as a place that naturally wants to contain justice and wants to correct injustice.

That narrative adds strength and momentum to the side of those who would work for justice and makes an uphill climb for those who would work against justice. The ability to create that narrative, the ability to tell the big story in that way is what made Dr. King such an enduring and admired leader.

Now it’s one thing to acknowledge somebody like Dr. King up as an example, and another thing to figure out how to do it yourself. If you’re expecting it to come without practice, you’ve bought into the wrong narrative. The truth is that the people who develop that ability have tried over and over again before they figured it out. If you’re on that path, and especially if you’re trying to write a book, check out whether Author Coaching or my Author Club would be a good fit to help you get over the finish line.