What The Strongest Conceits in Movie History Taught Me About My Love of Making Lists

And Why Horror Has So Many Sub-Genres

Colin Farrell is a publicist cheating on his wife: just an all-around gross sentence and also the opening to 2002’s Phone Booth.

Farrell walks into a phone booth at 53rd and 8th and is rude to a pizza delivery person, in New Yawk City of all places!

Just as Farrell hangs up the phone in Manhattan’s last phone booth, it rings.

Farrell (playing Stuart Shepard) picks up, and on the other line is a man who reveals his knowledge of the affair that Shepard is having. Shepard doesn’t know why he’s being held hostage, but he knows if he hangs up on the caller, he will be shot. And we’re off.

I love 2002’s Phone Booth more than I should. That might be because it could, arguably, be the strongest conceit ever put on film.

Hot take, I know, but hear me out.

Other conceits may be more fun to watch, other conceits may be executed more successfully, their may be conceits that are just qualitatively better, but I can’t think of another conceit in any film that is more specific, more restricting to its own storytelling, than a story that restricts its main character to a space the size of a coffin.

I would need 40 years to watch the amount of films I’d need to watch in order to feel truly qualified to write a canonical list of the strongest conceits in movie history.

So what better time to write that list than now!?

Here are some of my favorite movie conceits – in no particular order – which I also think overlap with many of the strongest of all-time (a few spoilers lie ahead):

• A man is trapped in a phone booth. Phone Booth (2002).
• If a Los Angeles City bus goes under 50 miles per hour it blows up. Speed (1994).
• Vampires break loose in an Alaskan town that won’t see sunlight for another month. 30 Days of Night (2007).
• During a home invasion, a woman and her daughter are locked inside their panic room. Panic Room (2002).
• Over the course of one night, a police precinct is attacked. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).
• A serial killer that attacks you in your dreams. The Nightmare on Elm Street series, starting in 1984.
• A man has exactly 90 real-time minutes to free his kidnapped daughter. Nick of Time (1995).
• A ghost-seeing kid helps a ghost who doesn’t know he’s a ghost. The Sixth Sense (1999).
• A panda learns kung fu. Kung Fu Panda (2008).
• Spiders. Just, spiders. Arachnophobia (1990).
• An outcast police unit must fight their way through a project building filled with baddies to the big crime boss on the top floor.The Raid 2 (2014).
• A bad guy holds up a NYC subway train.The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974).
• A pizza shop on a hot, New York City summer’s day. Do The Right Thing (1989).
• To catch a serial killer, an investigator must rely on the consult of another serial killer. The Silence of The Lambs (1992).
• A young farm girl from Kansas suffers a head injury from a tornado [The Wizard of Oz (1939)], or, alternatively, a small man wields out-sized power over a magical realm from behind a curtain.
• The first world war viewed through a “single” tracking shot. 1917 (2019).
• The dead rise from their graves to attack the living. Night of the Living Dead (1968).
• Criminals break into a blind man’s Detroit home who quickly turns the tables on them. Don’t Breathe (2016).
• A murder plot unravels around a very specific life-insurance policy. Double Indemnity (1944).
• A man wants to die, and so he is shown what the world he’s known would have been if he had never existed. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946).
• In order to survive, you have to be silent. A Quiet Place (2018).
• A man is abducted and kept in a room for reasons he does not know, after 15 years he is let out. Oldboy (2003).
• A man takes a red pill and wakes up to the realization that he has been existing in a computer simulation, takes advantage of this knowledge under the tutelage of a sci-fi sensei, and goes back into that simulated world to free it via any kung fu means necessary.The Matrix (1999).

Ok, that last one’s a bit long.

By and large, I think the stronger a conceit, the shorter its description. “A man is trapped in a phone booth by a sniper” is beautifully simplistic, smartly dumb.

But the earlier in our pop culture history, the broader the conceit could be. Many once-conceits have now become their own sub-genres.

We take zombie movies for granted now, but Night of the Living Dead (1968) is probably the biggest reason that most Americans even know what zombies are to begin with. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that mainstream America even knew of the Voodoo legend.

There are many competing etymologies, most revolve around different African legends and the reanimation of the dead, brought to the west via a forging of cultures in Haiti.

But more than one theory involves different toxins and even powerful drugs inducing a stupor in the living.

This mythology traveled with the transatlantic slave trade, taking root in the Caribbean in the French colony now known as Haiti. That’s where the witch doctors used powerful potions made of natural venoms and poisons from the land, drugging people to mess with their minds and make sure they’d do whatever they were asked. Then they were put to work doing menial labor in the fields. Though they may have been so out of it that they looked like dead people who had come back to life, that wasn’t the case. “These weren’t flesh-eating cannibals. They were compliant servants,” Lauro says. 

When U.S. troops occupied the island country in the early 1900s, they were intrigued with these fantastical stories and brought them back to America. One writer gave them a vivid description: dead men walking in the cane fields. “That’s when Hollywood got very interested,” Lauro says. “The idea of a walking corpse was made for the big screen.”

University of Tampa

Over time, the conceits have to tighten up. By the end of the 20th century, the dead rising from their graves is something audiences have already seen. In fact we’ve seen it so much you can make an entire meta-movie about zombie movies, Zombieland (2009).

Just having a Vampire in your film is enough for Nosferatu in 1922. By 2007, we need some high-concept shit.

Taking advantage of the naturally occurring, but still otherworldly lack of sunlight near the arctic circle, in the context of the myth that sunlight is dangerous to vampires, is absolutely genius. Not to mention it gave us one of the most perfectly paradoxical movie titles of all time: 30 Days of Night.

We can argue as to the varying degrees of success with which the films above fulfilled the potential of their conceits.

Speed should’ve never left the bus (lest we forget, it ends on a runaway subway train). The original Assault on Precinct 13 had a pretty mild ending, befitting the budget and technology of the time. Using “real time” in the context of a kidnapping is brilliant, but I can’t say I remember much more about the plot of Nick of Time other than a mall and, like, a glass elevator maybe?

As for Oldboy, the conceit sets up a much more complicated story that unravels before us as we watch the screenwriters write out answers to their own questions, “for what earthly reason would a person imprison someone for 15 years and then let them out? Why would someone imprison someone else for that long and never tell them why? How could someone be held in solitary confinement for 15 years for reasons they don’t know? And how could they not figure out the reason for their imprisonment after all that time?” The answer is upsetting beyond what I thought was possible in film before I saw it. Now that’s a hell of a payoff for an already strong conceit.

What Do Conceits Have To Do With Our Biggest Fears?

You may notice that of all the films on my list, the majority of them skew to the thriller/horror/action film where a baddie threatens the life of our protagonist (and by extension, us).

There would definitely be more horror films on my list if I was a bigger fan of the genre, and honestly, not so easily scared by them. Poltergeist is one of those conceits that is so strong it becomes a sub-genre, Get Out is brilliant but I’m not sure that a one-sentence description does it justice. (The reality of being Black in America is a literal horror story?)

Throughout film, and maybe throughout the history of storytelling (Brothers Grimm myths, urban legends, the little bits I know about the Odyssey seems pretty scary) our highest concept stories are the ones that play on our biggest fears.

Claustrophobia shows up many times in different ways on this list (Phone Booth, Panic Room). Aracnaphobia shows up in Arachnophobia. Fear of immobility in Rear Window, of birds in Birds, of mariticide in Double Indemnity.

Maybe it’s the nature of dramas to shy away from conceit, for some vague fear a writer might have of not speaking direct as possible to the human experience, of using genre as a crutch. (Or maybe it’s just the fact that anything high-concept is no longer defined as Drama, Drama acting as something of a non-genre specific catch-all.)

But if Mare of Easttown proves anything it’s that you can achieve drama’s loftiest goals while working within, and subverting when necessary, the expectations of genre. As the saying goes, “the specific is the universal” when it comes to storytelling.

So I’m not sure that it’s a failure of other genres to produce high-concept films, but rather that there is something about our relationship to the things that scare us, that calls for us to name them, and to name them so specifically, in so many different ways.

This something is called Negativity Bias:

the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one’s psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things

Wiki

The experiences that threaten our lives most acutely are, from an evolutionary perspective, our most negative experiences.

The slicing and dicing of our negative experiences, the act of organizing and identifying our many fears give horror its many sub-genres, and can be traced to a facet of Negativity Bias called “Negative Differentiation”, the idea that,

“the conceptualization of negativity is more elaborate and complex than that of positivity. For instance, research indicates that negative vocabulary is more richly descriptive of the effective experience than that of positive vocabulary”.

Our fear of death, with its many faces, is more potent than even the most emotionally stressful experiences that might show up in a drama (family strife, regret, grief, romantic failure).

Because thrillers – and especially horror – get so specific is because we as humans have imagined their subject matter more intensely than any other phenomenon that make their way into film.

The way we think about our fears – broadly: over long stretches of time, and specifically: dissecting them into smaller and smaller specifications – is a lot like the way I make lists.

I Love Making Lists

I may not have noticed it until my fiancee pointed it out, but I make a lot of lists.

I keep them in the back of my mind, I keep my head on a swivel for new additions. I am hyper vigilant in my list building the way early human was hyper vigilant for predators.

In the notes app on my phone I have a notebook just for lists. It currently consists of these lists:

• Movies to watch
• Books to read (and what an ambitious list it is)
• Top 10 concerts I’ve been to (9 of 10 slots filled)
• Top 10 movies that are the most me (certainly my favorite movies are among them, but this is a list of my favorite movies that I can rewatch endlessly but also feel like they are closest to who I am as a person. Think comedy meets coming of age movies with a pinch of sentiment and romance).
• Funniest Basketball Scenes in Movie History
• Tallest buildings in the World and the Years That They Were the Tallest Buildings (Empire State spent 40 years on top, Sears tower 25 years, while the Petronas Towers and Taipei 101 only had 6 years each)

In a shared Drive folder Jayme and I kept up with a list of all the restaurants we visited in the twin cities and our notes on them, until, well, we couldn’t keep up with it.

In my mind I’ve kept a list of Songs by Girls That Would be Good for a Guy to Cover which includes songs by Tegan and Sara, Sheryl Crow, Robyn, Duffy, Tracy Chapman, and Whitney Houston, among others.

Who cares? Who cares what about your weird lists, Jordan?

I don’t think my particular lists are inherently interesting, but what is interesting is that we just call lists, “lists”.

In actuality, lists are extended metaphors: they bring together otherwise disparate items via one aspect that all items on the list share. How else do you get Double Indemnity, Kung Fu Panda, and The Raid 2 on the same list?

And metaphors themselves are just another word (a metaphor) for patterns. Finding patterns, finding connections, is arguably the thing human brains evolved to do.

As George Lakoff puts it in Metaphors We Live By,

“The most important claim we have made (in Lakoff’s writing) so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical.”

And,

“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

Via GoodReads

That red and black plant? Better not eat it because another plant with the same colors killed your cousin with its poison.

That formation of shadows on the horizon? You’ve seen prides of lion cast similar shadows before, better not get to close.

A person you’re attracted to laughed at a joke of yours earlier and now their hug lingers a bit long? That’s a pattern of attraction humans need to take advantage of if we are to survive as a species.

To further drive this point home, let’s turn to Lakoff one last time.

“LABOR IS A RESOURCE and TIME IS A RESOURCE are by no means universal. They emerged naturally in our culture because of the way we view work, our passion for quantification, and our obsession with purposeful ends. These metaphors highlight those aspects of labor and time that are centrally important in our culture.

…

In viewing labor as a kind of activity, the metaphor assumes that labor can be clearly identified and distinguished from things that are not labor. It makes the assumptions that we can tell work from play and productive activity from nonproductive activity.

…

As a result, LEISURE TIME becomes a RESOURCE too—to be spent productively, used wisely, saved up, budgeted, wasted, lost, etc. What is hidden by the RESOURCE metaphors for labor and time is the way our concepts of LABOR and TIME affect our concept of LEISURE, turning it into something remarkably like LABOR.

Metaphors are fundamental to our existence within, and understanding of, the world (“the world”, here, a metaphor for the specific society we live in) in which we live.

What we pluck from that world, what we chose to pay attention to, informs us of our priorities.

For me, lists allow me to identify the things I love. I would argue, and maybe Lakoff would agree, that lists are the logical, numerical, quantifiable way people publicly present the things they love in a society that is constantly transactional, relentlessly quantifying, and whose main metaphor for human experience is financial.

Just look at the popularity of Listicles which own an entire corner of the internet and are arguably the cause of Buzzfeed’s rise (which just won a Pulitzer by the way).

Thank You, The A.V. Club

I probably got my particular love of lists by growing up with The A.V. Club.

On my near-weekly runs to the record store in High School I would always make sure to grab the latest Onion from their racks near the exit of The Exclusive Company on Milwaukee’s East Side.

The A.V. Club wouldn’t make the standard Top 10 lists common to music publications (“Best Rock Singles”, “Best West Coast Rappers”, “Most Important Albums”) but rather, they’d find niche ideas to expound upon. And their lists weren’t ranked.

Take “Eleven Songs In Search of a Soundtrack” from The A.V. Club in 2007. Lists like this exploded my perception of what writing about music, and writing in general, could be: the more creative the topic of a list, the more fun the conversation. Reading those A.V. Club lists felt like a release, a relief from the seriousness that publications like Rolling Stone or Pitchfork can get weighed down in.

Creative lists also allow you to write about songs or movies or moments in time that wouldn’t have a home anywhere else. They give the reader a hook, pulling them into an essay that would otherwise be “some words about the movie Phone Booth I felt I needed to write”.

The more lists I make – the more I have running in the back of my mind at any one time – the more specific the lists get. The more specific the list, the more I exercise that muscle key to all writing: finding connections.

A year ago, I wrote an article about “Things That Are What They Are But Are Also Other Things”. In it, I argue that Horrible Bosses is in practice, a road trip movie. But the overall idea of that essay is one that I’m investigating here, again. This article isn’t just an essay about lists or movie conceits. It’s a reason to explore the connections between things that feel similar, whose similarities I don’t understand until I “write them through“.

The more lists I make, the more I’m able to understand the value in art and entertainment I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I can enjoy Real Housewives because I grew up with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Bret “The Hitman” Hart. I can see in a Pollock my love of graffiti. I’m able to see how a Basquiat painting reminds me of the sounds on Illmatic reminds me of scenes from Paris is Burning: all of them humming with a late 80’s/early 90’s New York City electricity that I would venture to posit no longer exists.

Through a list I’m able to validate my love of Phone Booth by concocting a convoluted logic to place it alongside some of cinema’s most celebrated titles. Because, after all, in a society that counts everything, my love is not enough reason to value something.

Lastly: Reddit.

I browse reddit way too much. Reddit has a feature where you can save a story or link or comment. All social media has that feature now.

Looking back on my Reddit Saves recently I realized most of them are pictures or videos of nature, or, human creations tightly intertwined with nature.

Realizing that I’ve subconsciously been making a list of nature and human’s artistic interactions with nature makes me realize (a list):

1. I think nature is beautiful (what a revelation!)

2. I should value the time I spend in the nature that is close to home, as often as I can,

3. and not just long for some perfect, distant landscape, (though its hard not to when…).

4. And it makes me reflect on why I accidentally made a list of nature scenes: I think humans find nature so beautiful because, I mean, what else was there for 90% of our existence? The beauty of nature seems fundamental to our consciousness. As though something within us woke up after seeing our first sunset.

Realizing I like making lists helped me understand how I think about the things I love, and lists, inside the confines of a quantitative society, help me identify the qualities shared by the things I enjoy.

But most importantly, of course, making lists made me realize how much I really, really enjoy Phone Booth.