The Invention of Spoilers

When the destination became the journey

As a young twenty-something film fan, I read a book my brother got at Christmas about the best horror movies which gave a plot summary of each film and a mini review/essay about why the movie is great. In it, I saw a page on Don’t Look Now, a film I had heard all about and seen parodies of everywhere. The book explained the whole plot including the twist ending. My eyes widened and my hackles rose as I discovered the red-coated figure was a serial killer and not the ghost of a grief stricken man’s daughter. Far from ruining the movie, I knew I had to see it, and when I did, it still scared the bejeesus out of me. The last thing that review did was ‘spoil’ Don’t Look Now, a movie that remains a favourite.

I don’t remember my first encounter with a ‘spoiler warning’ but I do remember the first time anyone cared about the topic. It was 1999 and The Sixth Sense had just come out (only two years after The Fifth Element which I thought meant there was some sort of of Bruce Willis sequel chain going on that I was unaware of). I knew nothing about the film but what I had seen in a trailer (that I had caught before another movie because, yes, it was still the only real way you could see a trailer back then), so I went in ‘blind’. I still don’t care what everyone said in the following months, I don’t see how anyone could have predicted the twist in that story. Not back then anyway. It blew my tiny, 15-year-old mind. I told everyone to go and see it without revealing the twist. “Why is it so good?” People would ask. “You’ve just got to see it, trust me.” Quickly though, rumour got out that it had a twist, not what the twist was mind you, just that it had a twist. This, unfortunately meant, when I got back to school and others had seen it the usual sneering shrug from the smart-Alecs was that they “saw it coming a mile off”. I didn’t believe them, and still don’t, but it also felt a lot like they knew there was a twist coming so could predict it. This was also the same year I saw The Usual Suspects (a few years late admittedly) which also blew my head off so that, again, I told everyone to see it but felt like I couldn’t tell them why. This was also the same year Fight Club came out, not long after Seven, two films that, while not relying on their twists, certainly impacted an audience’s reading of…