Since the birth of cinema, viewers around the globe have been mesmerised by the magic of movies. In a world increasingly saturated with audio-visual narratives, we are all acutely aware of film’s ability to command our attention and arouse intense emotional responses that live on long after a screening. And yet, over a century since storytelling first appeared onscreen, we remain relatively clueless as to how this artform achieves such spellbinding effects.

Some have set out to paint the power of movies as an innate and unknowable witchcraft capable of mesmerising the masses and leading lesser minds astray. But to do so is to misconstrue the nature of this magic. Just as stage magicians utilise a series of mundane mechanical steps to create an illusion in the mind of their audience that a solid matter has somehow disappeared into thin air or a woman has been sawn in half, filmmakers appear to adopt techniques that prey upon psychological mechanisms operating below our conscious awareness.

‘In essence, every conscious action by an artist, all art, is a “trick”’, writes Roman Jakobson (cited in Dąbała 2012, p. 21). A renewed focus on the magic of movies as the result of screencraft, rather than witchcraft, may shed light on the psychologically manipulative manoeuvres that screen storytellers from Hitchcock to Tarantino utilise without full, scientific understanding. In doing so, filmmakers might discover enhanced remedial tools that help resolve common creative problems. Film theorists and critics might learn to analyse movies on newfound aesthetic grounds. And film fans like you, too, might finally understand how the movies made you do it.