Tomb

“This is a story of love and loss, fathers and sons, and the foresight to retain international merchandising rights. This is the story of Star Wars. Let's begin with Part Four.”

That, of course, is Peter Griffin from Family Guy preparing to tell his family a little story about lightsabers, Death Stars and The Force. If you were a child of the ’70s, you probably recall listening to that story yourself, or telling it to others. VCRs weren't big yet and it seemed perfectly worthwhile to describe interesting movies in magnificent detail. We can tell jokes and stories, so why not films?

Etiquette about “spoiling” movies has largely quashed the art of movietelling in recent years, at least among adults. (Children have no such rules and will happily recite Finding Nemo if the mood takes them.) The prevailing attitude seems to be that learning too much about an unseen film makes it impossible to enjoy; a position I disagree with. After all, we love familiar stories. Why do you think so many sequels, remakes and adaptations get made? Kids gleefully watch their favourite films over and over again, a practice some of us retain as adults. Any film that can be “spoiled” by preknowledge is probably weak to begin with.

Telling a movie properly is a skill. Some do it well, some less so. My cousin Greg used to be a brilliant movieteller. When we were kids, I'd listen wide-eyed to his detailed descriptions of films I was not yet old enough to see, like Alien (1979). Greg's version of Alien scared the hell out of me. I was a squeamish kid, and wouldn't have the nerve to watch Alien until many years later, but for some reason, I had no problem reading the comic, or the photo-illustrated screenplay, or listening to my cousin's harrowing account of the film. By the time I got around to actually watching the damn thing, I knew every detail inside and out, and it still scared me.

Greg's retelling of The Incredible Melting Man (1977) was more memorable than the film itself. “There's this astronaut, right? And the radiation in outer space makes his face melt. So back on Earth, he somehow knows — he just knows — that he needs to eat human flesh in order to stay alive. So he's running around, killing people and eating them, and the whole time this melting thing is getting worse and worse. Like, his ear and bits of goop are dropping off him, right? And he pulls a fisherman's head off and throws it in the river. And they show the head floating down the river and going over a waterfall! In the end, he just melts away into a big, sloppy puddle and a janitor finds the puddle the next day and mops it up. The end.”

Comedy films are prime candidates for movietelling, despite our taboos about spoilers. Most viewers will happily describe the funny bits from a comedy they've just seen, possibly because it feels very similar to telling a traditional joke, a practice we're a lot less fussy about. Think about the last genuinely funny movie you saw. Chances are, you described some of the really good bits to your friends, and chances are your friends didn't mind at all and still laughed later on when they saw the film themselves.

If you're thinking of brushing up on your movietelling skills and becoming a true film raconteur, choose your material and your audience carefully. Children and groups of three to five listeners are most likely to stay quiet; otherwise, answer questions as you go along and adapt to whatever audience participation comes into play. Pick a film that your audience is unlikely to watch; for some reason, we can be fascinated by a description of a movie that we don't intend to pay to see. Have fun!