What Is a Red Herring? Meaning and 10 Movie Examples

Marion Crane steals $40,000 from her boss and drives off into the rain. For the whole first act of Psycho, you worry about the money. Will the cop who finds her asleep by the roadside search the car? Will she get caught? Will she give it back? Then she checks into the Bates Motel, steps into the shower, and the money stops mattering. Norman Bates sinks it in a swamp without ever knowing it was there.

Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut exactly what he’d done: “the first part of the story was a red herring.” He made the theft long on purpose, so the murder would hit harder. That’s a red herring: a clue or a character built to send you the wrong way. (Hitchcock also made the MacGuffin famous, and the stolen money works as both.)

What Is a Red Herring?

A red herring is a plot device that misleads on purpose. It can be a suspect who looks guilty, a clue that seems to explain everything or a theory the hero gets wrong. Writers use it to hide the truth in plain sight, so the audience feels fooled, not cheated, when the real answer arrives.

The name comes from a fish. A red herring is a herring smoked for days until it turns reddish brown and smells strong enough to keep for months. In 1807, the journalist William Cobbett wrote that as a boy he’d dragged one across a trail to pull hounds off a hare’s scent. He was attacking newspapers for chasing a false story about Napoleon, and the story was probably made up. The image stuck anyway. Language historians have found no evidence that huntsmen ever trained hounds with herrings.

A red herring is easy to mix up with the other two devices in this series. A Chekhov’s gun is a promise: shown early, it has to pay off. A MacGuffin is a goal: everyone wants it, and what it is barely matters. A red herring is a lie: it points the wrong way, and it’s meant to fall apart. Foreshadowing is its honest twin, a true clue you don’t notice until later.

10 Red Herring Examples in Movies

These 10 red herring examples count down from a dinner party to a family will. Every entry tells you what the red herring is, who it fools, what the truth turns out to be and how the film did.

10) Clue (1985)

Six blackmail victims, one dead host and three different endings, so even the audience couldn’t agree on who did it.

It’s 1954, and six strangers arrive at a New England mansion under fake names. Each is being blackmailed by Mr. Boddy. He hands out the weapons from the board game, the lights go out, and Boddy is dead. By the end of the night, so are the cook, a stranded motorist, the maid, a cop and a singing telegram girl. Wadsworth the butler, played by Tim Curry, even waves off communism as “just a red herring.”

Paramount sent each theater one of three endings. In one, Miss Scarlet is behind it. In another, Mrs. Peacock did everything. In the third, almost everyone killed someone. Director Jonathan Lynn later said the gimmick backfired, because audiences didn’t know which ending to see, so they skipped it. Clue opened with about $2 million and finished just short of its budget. Home video now plays all three endings in a row, and that version made it a cult favorite.

9) Hot Fuzz (2007)

A London supercop is sent to the safest village in England, where the accidents keep piling up.

Nicholas Angel, played by Simon Pegg, is so good at his job that the Met ships him off to Sandford to stop him making everyone else look bad. Then people start dying. A couple loses their heads in a “car crash.” A man dies in a gas explosion. A journalist is crushed by falling church masonry. Angel connects the victims to a property deal and pins it on Simon Skinner, the grinning supermarket manager played by Timothy Dalton.

Angel is half right. Skinner is in on it. But the motive is far sillier than money. The Neighbourhood Watch Alliance kills people for spoiling the village’s chances: a bad actor, an ugly house, a misspelled newspaper. Skinner sums it up himself: “the truth is far less complex.” Hot Fuzz opened with £7.1 million in the UK and won the Empire Award for Best Comedy.

8) Now You See Me (2013)

Four street magicians rob a bank in Paris from a stage in Las Vegas, and the FBI goes after the wrong man.

The Four Horsemen, a team of magicians played by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco, pull off three heists in front of live audiences. Dylan Rhodes, an FBI agent played by Mark Ruffalo, chases them. Thaddeus Bradley, played by Morgan Freeman, makes his living exposing magicians, and he seems to know every trick before it happens.

So the Horsemen frame him. They plant the stolen cash in his car, and he ends up in a cell looking like the man who planned it all. The real planner is Rhodes, the son of a magician Bradley humiliated 30 years earlier. The film tells you the rule in its first line: the more you think you see, the easier it is to fool you. Now You See Me opened at #2 behind Fast & Furious 6 and made nearly five times its budget.

7) Saw (2004)

Two men wake up chained in a filthy bathroom, and the man who seems to be behind it is out there with a gun.

Dr. Lawrence Gordon, played by Cary Elwes, and a photographer named Adam, played by writer Leigh Whannell, are chained at opposite ends of a bathroom. Between them lies a dead man holding a gun and a tape recorder. Meanwhile, Zep Hindle, an orderly played by Michael Emerson, holds Gordon’s wife and daughter at gunpoint and watches the bathroom on a monitor. Everything about him says killer.

Zep reaches the bathroom, and Adam kills him. A tape in Zep’s pocket reveals the truth. He’d been poisoned and was playing Jigsaw’s game for the antidote. Then the dead man in the middle of the floor stands up. He’s John Kramer, the real Jigsaw, and he’s been there all along. Wan and Whannell shot the film in 18 days. It opened at #3 on Halloween weekend and launched one of horror’s biggest franchises.

6) Prisoners (2013)

Two little girls vanish on Thanksgiving, and a desperate father decides he’s found the man who took them.

Keller Dover, played by Hugh Jackman, sees an old RV near his house the day his daughter disappears. Its driver, Alex Jones, played by Paul Dano, is arrested and then released. The police say he has the IQ of a 10-year-old and couldn’t have planned it. Keller doesn’t believe them. He kidnaps Alex and tortures him in an empty building.

Then Detective Loki, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, finds a second suspect. Bob Taylor draws mazes, sneaks into houses and keeps bloody children’s clothes. The clothes turn out to be soaked in pig’s blood. Both men were once victims of the real kidnapper: Holly Jones, the woman Alex knows as his aunt, played by Melissa Leo. Prisoners opened at #1, and Roger Deakins was nominated for the Oscar for Best Cinematography.

5) The Da Vinci Code (2006)

A symbologist races across Europe to solve a murder at the Louvre, chased by a monk working for a man called the Teacher.

Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks, is framed for the murder of a Louvre curator. The killer is Silas, an albino monk played by Paul Bettany. Silas takes orders from a voice called the Teacher and reports to Bishop Aringarosa, played by Alfred Molina, a powerful figure in Opus Dei. A shadowy church plot with a bishop at the top: the film all but points at him.

The bishop’s name is the giveaway. Aringarosa is a loose play on aringa rossa, Italian for red herring. The real Teacher is Sir Leigh Teabing, played by Ian McKellen, the Grail expert who takes Langdon in. Aringarosa was used too. The Da Vinci Code took $224 million worldwide in its opening weekend, the second biggest opening ever at the time, and became the biggest film here.

4) Mystic River (2003)

Three boyhood friends are pulled back together when one man’s daughter is murdered, and another comes home that night covered in blood.

Jimmy, Dave and Sean grew up together in Boston. As boys, Dave was abducted and abused by two men posing as police. Twenty-five years later, Jimmy’s daughter Katie is murdered. That same night, Dave, played by Tim Robbins, comes home with a bloody hand and a story about fighting off a mugger. The story keeps changing.

Jimmy, played by Sean Penn, decides Dave did it. He forces a confession out of him by the river and kills him. Too late, the police find Katie’s real killers: two boys, one of them the younger brother of her boyfriend. The man Dave killed that night was a predator he’d caught with a child. Penn and Robbins both won Oscars, and the film made more than five times its budget.

3) Chinatown (1974)

A private eye takes a routine adultery case and walks into a scheme to steal water from the whole city of Los Angeles.

A woman calling herself Evelyn Mulwray hires private eye Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, to prove her husband is cheating. Jake photographs Hollis Mulwray, the city’s water engineer, with a young woman, and the pictures make the papers. Then the real Evelyn, played by Faye Dunaway, walks into his office. The woman who hired him was a fake, and Jake was used to smear Hollis. Soon Hollis is found drowned.

The affair was never an affair. The girl is Katherine, Evelyn’s daughter by her own father, Noah Cross, played by John Huston. Cross is dumping the city’s water at night to force farmers to sell their land cheap. Towne won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” is #74 on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest movie quotes. It’s the highest scoring film on this list.

2) Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

A millionaire is stabbed 12 times on a snowbound train, and every clue in his cabin is a lie.

Hercule Poirot, played by Albert Finney, boards the Orient Express in Istanbul. A snowdrift stops the train in Yugoslavia, and in the morning the American businessman Ratchett is dead in his cabin. The clues pile up fast. Mrs. Hubbard, played by Lauren Bacall, finds a conductor’s button in her compartment and later a bloody knife in her bag. A conductor’s uniform turns up in a suitcase. Ratchett’s watch is smashed at 1:15. A woman in a kimono is seen in the corridor.

Every clue points to an outsider dressed as a conductor. Every clue was planted by the passengers. Poirot gives two solutions: the stranger who escaped into the snow, and the truth. The passengers all had a reason to want Ratchett dead, and they took turns with the knife. Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and the film earned six nominations in all.

1) Knives Out (2019)

A famous crime writer dies on the night of his 85th birthday party, and his nurse is sure she killed him.

Harlan Thrombey, played by Christopher Plummer, is found with his throat cut. His family, every one of them living off his money, is under suspicion. Detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, is hired by someone anonymous to investigate. Then, half an hour in, the film seems to give the game away. Harlan’s nurse Marta, played by Ana de Armas, mixes up his medicine, and he slits his own throat to protect her.

So you stop asking who did it and start asking whether Marta will get caught. That’s the red herring. Harlan’s grandson Ransom, played by Chris Evans, had switched the vials hours earlier, hoping Marta would kill Harlan by mistake. She gave Harlan the right drug after all. Rian Johnson told SlashFilm he wanted “an engine that was closer to a Hitchcock thriller.” Knives Out made almost eight times its budget and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Every one of these films hides the truth behind something false. Here’s how they did.

Saw turned about $1.2 million into more than $100 million, almost 86 times its budget. Nothing else here comes close. Clue is the only film that didn’t earn back its budget. Murder on the Orient Express is left off because sources disagree on its budget.

The critics tell another story. Saw, the biggest earner for its budget, scores just 50%. The Da Vinci Code made the most money of all and scores lowest, at 25%. The two films where the red herring is the whole plot, Chinatown and Knives Out, score highest.

How to Write a Red Herring

A red herring only works if the audience forgives you when it falls apart. Here’s how to earn that:

1. Give the false clue an innocent explanation. Dave Boyle’s blood in Mystic River is real. It just belongs to someone else. When the truth comes out, the clue still makes sense.
2. Give your suspect a real secret. Every guest in Clue is hiding something. Innocent characters who act guilty for a reason feel fair. Innocent characters who act guilty for no reason feel like a cheat.
3. Play fair. Put the truth on screen. In Knives Out, the clue that clears Marta is there the whole time. Our screenwriting guide covers how to build clues into a structure, and our guide to Freytag’s pyramid shows where the reveal should land.

FAQs About the Red Herring

The Final Cut on the Red Herring

A red herring is a lie the story tells you on purpose. It can be a suspect, a clue or a whole case. The best ones fall apart in a way that makes the truth hit harder, and they leave the real answer on screen for anyone who looks.

Which red herring fooled you the first time? And would the ending have worked if it hadn’t?

That wraps up our plot devices series. Read the other two: our guides to Chekhov’s gun and the MacGuffin. For true clues instead of false ones, see our foreshadowing examples in movies.