Alfred Hitchcock gave name to a literary and film device called a MacGuffin (sometimes spelled “McGuffin”), which is any object or device that serves to trigger the plot. This boils down to anything that sets the plot in motion or keeps it going in one direction or another. In terms of Hitchcock, the birds were the MacGuffin in . . . well, The Birds and he used others like Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho to keep things going.
While he may have coined the term, Hitchcock wasn’t the only one to use MacGuffins. They have been around for a long time, especially in some incredible works of fiction. Here are the 10 greatest MacGuffins from some of the greatest movies ever made.
Read the article on Listverse.com
