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The Symbolic World

422 - Why Exaggeration Is Necessary in Storytelling

The Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau

Education, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8933 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Given we're still in the fall season, I watched The Conjuring and it got me thinking about how real events can become exaggerated in story form. In this video, I look at how legends are created, and that exaggeration of certain elements of an event can help amplify the meaning and purpose of why we're paying attention to it in the first place.

Original YouTube version: https://youtu.be/fA2cKrvYyTk

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

It is fall, you know, it is that time where days are getting darker and things are getting

0:05.6

creepier. We're getting, we're around the time of Halloween and all of those questions. And so

0:11.7

a few weeks ago when I was flying, I usually don't watch these kinds of movies, but for some

0:18.1

reason I got pulled into watching a movie from that series called The Conjuring.

0:23.8

And so I've actually never watched these movies. I kind of knew about them slightly. And so I decided to watch, I think, the first one on the plane. And I was pleasantly surprised. I kind of enjoyed it. I was surprised to see how, I would say, how Christian it was,

0:42.2

you know, in the sense that the characters are obviously not, are not hostile to Christianity.

0:47.1

They seem to suggest that they are Christians, that they believe in God. You know, they call upon

0:52.2

priests in order to do exorcisms. They also seem to believe that the hauntings are not actually the actual spirits, but are more

1:02.0

of a kind of demonic, that kind of stuff.

1:05.0

But so I was kind of, you know, pleasantly interested in.

1:09.0

I realized that this whole conjjuring series was actually,

1:13.4

there are all these other movies that were kind of attached to it, all these other horror movies,

1:18.8

what is it called, Annabelle and The Nun, and that these are based on true stories. They're

1:25.0

based on the story of this couple that you see in the movie that are kind of like,

1:30.4

you could say, supernatural detectives that go around and help people that are having

1:35.8

these kind of hauntings or these kind of supernatural phenomena, things that happen in their life.

1:41.4

And so, you know, and I realized that this was related to the Amidaville horror story and all of these, these kind of haunting stories that exist in,

1:49.0

in the United States. And so I watched the movie and I knew that it was kind of based on true

1:54.7

stories, but one of the things I noticed in the movie, and this is really what I want to talk about,

1:59.5

is the way in which the story was exaggerated. And so, you know, in the movie, and this is really what I want to talk about, is the way in which the story was

2:01.2

exaggerated. And so, you know, in the movie, things get really wild, you know, and so in

2:08.1

all kinds of crazy things happen, you know, women get dragged on their feet on the floor with

...

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