pop THE FEAR OF KNOWING SIMON SPIEGEL (ED.) SPOILERS IN FILM, TV, LITERATURE AND GAMING CULTURE 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Simon Spiegel (ed.) The Fear of Knowing Spoilers in Film, TV, Literature and Gaming Culture 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb ROMBACH WISSENSCHAFT POP: CULTURE | MEDIA | AESTHETICS Edited by Daniel Illger and Christine Lötscher Volume 3 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Simon Spiegel (ed.) The Fear of Knowing Spoilers in Film, TV, Literature and Gaming Culture 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb © Coverpicture: Mash-up: Vertigo (Vertigo – Aus dem Reich der Toten). Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1958 (Blu-ray, Universal Studios 2021). Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Das Imperium schlägt zurück). Irvin Kershner, USA 1980 (DVD, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment 2004). Planet of the Apes (Planet der Affen). Franklin J. Schaffner, USA 1968 (DVD, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment 2006). Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1960 (Blu-ray, Universal Studios 2017). Rosemary’s Baby (Rosemaries Baby). Roman Polanski, USA 1968 (DVD, The Criterion Collection 2012). Memento. Christopher Nolan, USA 2000 (DVD, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment 2002). The Shining (Shining). Stanley Kubrick, GB 1980 (Blu-ray, Warner Brothers Entertainment 2019). Twin Peaks (Das Geheimnis von Twin Peaks). Idee: David Lynch und Mark Frost, USA 1990–1991 (DVD, CBS Studios 2016). The Usual Suspects (Die üblichen Verdäch tigen). Bryan Singer. USA 1995 (Blu-ray, Paramount Pictures 2016). Total Recall (Die totale Erinnerung – Total Recall). Paul Verhoeven. USA 1990 (Artisan Entertainment, Artisan Entertainment 1998). The Sixth Sense (The Sixth Sense – Der Sechste Sinn). M. Night Shyamalan. USA 1999 (DVD, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, o.J.) La jetée (Am Rande des Rollfelds). Chris Marker, FR 1962 (DVD, The Criterion Collection 2007). The pre-press of this publication was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation for the promotion of scientific research. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de ISBN 978-3-98858-114-3 (Print) 978-3-98858-115-0 (ePDF) 1st Edition 2025 © Simon Spiegel (ed.) Published by Rombach Wissenschaft Verlag within Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG Waldseestraße 3 – 5 | 76530 Baden-Baden www.nomos.de Production of the printed version: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG Waldseestraße 3 – 5 | 76530 Baden-Baden ISBN 978-3-98858-114-3 (Print) 978-3-98858-115-0 (ePDF) DOI https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivations 4.0 International License. Onlineversion Nomos eLibrary 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb “The owls are not what they seem.” (Twin Peaks) 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Table of Contents Simon Spiegel Introduction 11 Simon Spiegel On the Origins of Spoilers 19 Film and TelevisionPart 1: Milan Hain To Tell or Not to Tell? Promoting Films with a Surprise Twist 59 Matthias Brütsch Plot Points, Twists and Spoilers: On the Dramatic Impact of Withholding and Revealing Narrative Information 85 Tiffany Hong Love Persevering: Televisual Homage, Americana, and Interstitial Grief in WANDAVISION 105 Marcus Stiglegger Is Performative Cinema Spoiler-Resistant? 117 LiteraturePart 2: Albrecht Koschorke Some Notes on Suspense 133 Dana Steglich Spoil the Classics: Considering the Differences between Reading and Rereading Literature 145 7 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb James Aaron Green “Telling the Story Second-Hand”: Victorian Sensation Fiction and the Pre-History of the Spoiler 165 GamesPart 3: Tobias Unterhuber Spoil the Game, Shatter the World: Spoilers in Games and Play 183 Andreas Rauscher Playing with the Plot Twist: Perspectives on Spoilers in Games 199 ReceptionPart 4: Judith E. Rosenbaum Spoilers and the Narrative Experience: Lessons From Over a Decade of Empirical Research 221 Kristina Busse Spoiler Warnings: Negotiating Originality, Genre Expectation, and the Enjoyments of Repetition 241 Andrew Bumstead “I don’t need to be carried, bro.” SURVIVOR Edgic, Knowledge Communities, and Narrative Pleasure 261 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock Tender Gestures 281 ConversationsPart 5: Simon Spiegel “It’s like an allergic reaction.” A Conversation with Joshua Astrachan 291 Table of Contents 8 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Simon Spiegel “Film Has Turned from a Cultural Asset into a Commodity.” A Conversation with Noemi Ferrer Schwenk 299 Simon Spiegel “Death Is the Real Spoiler.” A Conversation with Adam Roberts 305 Contributors 319 Index 323 Table of Contents 9 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Simon Spiegel Introduction It seems a universally accepted truth that there are few social missteps more serious than spoiling a TV show, movie, or recently-published book. Casually mentioning at a dinner, during a coffee break, or over an after-work beer that Dumbledore is killed, Bruce Willis’s character is dead for most of The Sixth Sense (US 1999, Director: M. Night Shyamalan), or that James Bond dies at the end of No Time to Die (UK/US 2021, Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga), is generally considered a rude, even hostile, act that must be treated with the utmost severity. The fear of spoilers is so pervasive nowadays, it seems almost inconceivable that, not so long ago, people cared much less about them. Of course, it has always been possible to give away the ending of a story in advance, but for a long time, this was not considered an offence of the most extreme kind. It is only in the last quarter of a century that spoilers have become the bone of contention they are today. Although it is a relatively recent development, the fear of spoilers has become ubiquitous and is by no means limited to blockbuster movies or novels. It has long since made its way into high literary criticism as well as into the classroom. Even at academic conferences, it is not uncommon to hear someone in the audience complain that the speaker is revealing too much about the novel or film being discussed—something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. As ubiquitous as the fear of spoilers is, there has been surprisingly little research into it. The only exceptions are empirical psychology and fan stud­ ies. For more than a decade, psychologists have been investigating whether spoilers do, in fact, spoil the experience of reading a book or watching a movie—with contradictory, sometimes even counterintuitive results. In the traditional humanities and the broader field of cultural studies, by contrast, there is almost no research on spoilers, with the sole exception of fan studies, which has mainly looked at how various fandoms deal with spoilers. This lack of research into a phenomenon that affects almost everybody dealing with fictional or narrative content was the starting point for #spoiltheconference, a conference organized jointly by the Department of Film 11 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Studies and the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich, which took place in March 2022. Spoilers touch on many areas, including what kind of content can be spoiled, under what circumstances spoiling occurs, and how different audi­ ences react to it. The conference was therefore conceived from the outset as a truly interdisciplinary event, with contributions from film and literary studies, as well as from game and fan studies, and empirical psychology. As is often the case when scholars come together for the first time to discuss a hitherto neglected subject, it proved to be an extremely productive and stimulating event. Early on, we planned to use the conference as the basis for a collective volume. The result is The Fear of Knowing, which includes most of the papers presented at the conference as well as additional material. This collection of essays has three main goals. First, to cover an under-re­ searched subject for the first time; second, to do so from as many angles as possible; and third, to thereby start a conversation between fields that have seen little or no exchange so far. We begin with an introductory chapter by Simon Spiegel, in which he traces the origins of today’s fear of spoilers and lays some theoretical ground­ work for how spoilers work, or rather, how they are supposed to work. After outlining the genesis of the term “spoiler” in its modern sense, Spiegel argues that movies are generally much less susceptible to spoilers than is commonly believed, since most forms of suspense do not rely on the audience not knowing the outcome. The book is then divided into four sections that explore different areas. Three sections focus on specific media: film and television, literature, and games. The fourth section looks at reception and how different audiences deal with spoilers. Milan Hain opens the “Film and Television” section with an essay about films that rely on a major plot twist and the way Hollywood marketers have dealt with this challenge. Is a central plot twist something that is highlighted in the advertising campaign, or do studios tend to downplay it? By comparing movie trailers over seven decades, Hain shows that Hollywood has, during different historical periods, used different strategies to deal with the issue. There are famous examples, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (US 1960), which put the big surprise at the center of its marketing campaign, but there have also been times when trailers did not mention twists at all. Twist films are also the subject of Matthias Brütsch’s chapter, which focuses on the dramatic function of plot twists and their position in the overall plot construction. In particular, he looks at one—if not the—paradigmatic example Simon Spiegel 12 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb of a twist film, The Sixth Sense, which, as he argues, is so effective because its big twist does not coincide with the film’s climax, as is usually the case, but comes afterwards. In the next chapter, Tiffany Hong turns to television and the Marvel series WandaVision (US 2021, Creator: Jac Schaeffer). As Hong shows, WandaVision exhibits a particularly high degree of self-referentiality in that the series constantly comments on itself. One consequence of this meta-textu­ al approach is that the series also very self-consciously plays with spoilers and the fans’ engagement with them. Another unusual series is Too Old to Die Young (US 2019, Creator: Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker), which the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn created for Amazon. Marcus Stiglegger argues that, unlike many other series, Too Old to Die Young is essentially spoiler-resistant because the series is much more performative than narrative, i.e., it is less interested in developing a coherent plot than in providing a particular affec­ tive-corporeal experience that cannot be spoiled. The second section, “Literature,” begins with Albrecht Koschorke’s reflec­ tions on suspense, in which he considers at a fundamental level what kinds of narratives can actually be spoiled. As Koschorke shows, there are many kinds of stories for which spoilers are simply not an issue; in some ways, the whole idea of suspense, which is central to spoilers, is a modern phenomenon. Many older forms of narrative are not about creating suspense as we know it, but rather about ritually repeating what is already known. Dana Steglich examines the introductions to standard editions of literary classics, which often unashamedly assume that the plot of the respective novel is—or should be—already known, and thus do not take care to avoid potential spoilers. Steglich argues that the main reason for this is an elitist understanding of literature, one that values rereading more than first-time reading. One such classic, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), is the subject of James Aaron Green’s chapter. Collins’s novel is the first known instance of a book that was the subject of a proper spoiler debate, as the author specifically asked reviewers not to give away the plot. Green makes the case that it was no coincidence that The Woman in White sparked this discussion, since the novel is emblematic of a new media configuration. Video games are probably not what most people immediately think of in connection with spoilers. Nevertheless, spoiling is an issue that is intensively discussed among gamers as well as game scholars, and is the subject of the third section, “Games.” Introduction 13 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb After looking into the role of spoilers in video game culture as well as in game studies, Tobias Unterhuber returns to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, one of the foundational texts of game studies, to discuss on a basic level how games—and what kind of games—can be spoiled. While Unterhuber’s focus is mainly on video games, Andreas Rauscher looks at narrative board and role-playing games. His main interest is in the interaction between ludic and narrative elements, and how different game designs lead to very different effects in terms of potential spoiling. After three sections dealing with spoilers in various media, the fourth part, titled “Reception,” shifts the perspective. Here, the emphasis is not on the works themselves, but on how spoilers affect audiences, and how different groups deal with them. Judith Rosenbaum provides a sweeping overview of more than a decade of empirical research on the effects of spoilers. She traces how experimental design has become increasingly sophisticated in order to properly account for how audiences react to spoilers, but also how different approaches lead to divergent, sometimes outright contradictory results. Finally, she also discusses the inherent limitations of empirical research in this area. While Rosenbaum’s research is firmly grounded in the methods of empir­ ical science, Kristina Busse comes from a fan studies background. In her chapter, she describes a decisive change in the relationship between author and audience. Traditionally, the author has been considered the authority who decides how a text should be read. In recent years, however, there has been a shift towards an understanding of media consumption in which the recipients decide how they want to experience a particular work—which naturally also includes the question of spoilers. Busse looks specifically at various systems of tagging and content notes developed by different fan communities, which she sees as emblematic of this trend. A specific fan community is at the center of Andrew Bumstead’s chapter. He looks at the so-called Edgic community, fans of the TV show Survivor (US 2000– , Creator: Charlie Parsons) who try to—often successfully—predict the winner of a season through an intricate system of analyzing the narrative patterns of the ongoing show. Since Edgic fans do not actually know how a season will end, Edgic is not spoiling in its proper sense. The fact that it is nonetheless a contested activity within the larger Survivor fandom highlights the delicate relationship between different knowledge communities. The fourth section concludes with an essayistic piece by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, who has published extensively on M. Night Shyamalan—who, along with Alfred Hitchcock, is probably the most frequently mentioned Simon Spiegel 14 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb director in this volume. Weinstock looks at spoiler warnings, which he sees as a kind of social compact among like-minded individuals. One aspect that was central to the conference, and that we also wanted to emphasize in this collection, was the goal of going beyond a purely academic discussion to look at how the fear of spoilers affects the way movies, novels, games, and so on are created, distributed, and consumed. To do this, Simon Spiegel conducted interviews with three practitioners from different creative fields. These three conversations form the conclusion of the volume. Joshua Astrachan has worked in the film industry for over thirty years. He produced Robert Altman’s last three films and is currently a producer for Jim Jarmusch. In addition to these two quintessential independent directors, Astrachan has also worked on proper genre films such as the horror movie It Follows (US 2014, Director: David Robert Mitchell). He has, in other words, vast experience with very different kinds of movies and is therefore ideally positioned to talk about how the fear of spoilers affects filmmaking. One observation that he shares in his interview is how difficult it is nowadays to shield a film from the public eye, allowing the filmmakers their privacy and not presenting their work until they decide it is ready. The second interview is with film industry executive Noemi Ferrer Schwenk, who has worked in almost every part of the European film produc­ tion value chain over the last 25 years; including the German film distributor Prokino Filmverleih, the European funding institution Eurimages, and Zen­ tropa, the production company founded by Danish director Lars von Trier. One of the reasons that Ferrer Schwenk sees for the heightened sensitivity to spoilers is that audiences nowadays think of themselves more as consumers whose purchase of movie ticket or a subscription service entitles them to remain spoiler-free. The final chapter is a conversation with British author Adam Roberts. Roberts is not only a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, but also a renowned science fiction scholar. In addition, he regularly reviews films and novels for major newspapers. Aside from his views on spoilers in connection with his own books, Roberts also talks about the critics’ dilemma caused by the fact that some books cannot be properly reviewed without giving away key elements of the story. At the end of this wide-ranging conversation, Roberts develops a new and highly original psychoanalytic theory of spoilers. Introduction 15 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Editor’s Note Many people have been involved in making this book a reality. First of all, I would like to thank Christine Lötscher and Natalie Borsy who organized the #spoiltheconference conference with me and were also deeply involved in the early conception of this volume. Diliara Fruehauf and Andrea-Luca Bossard supported us during the conference and helped make it the success it was. The main reason why the conference was so productive and enjoyable was, of course, its participants. In addition to the contributors to this volume, my thanks go to Julia Gronhoff, Thomas Kristjansen, Michael Sennhauser, Anna Smith, Sebastian Smoliński, Wendy Wagner, and Eberhard Wolff, all of whom contributed to the conference in different ways. As a side event to the conference itself, we organized Memento, a festival of retelling films: an event where spoiling was for once compulsory. Monika Schärer hosted the event with aplomb, and Martin Weiss took care of the technical challenges. A special mention goes to Nurit Blatman, whose deft retelling of Once Upon a Time (US 2011–2018, Creator: Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz) won her the first prize. Many people supported the genesis of this book in various ways. I am especially indebted to Robert Blanchet for his skillful editing, and to Marcy Goldberg and Susie Trenka for their diligent proofreading. Thanks also to Jason Isaacs for wittering support, and to Denise Bucher, John Clute, Kim Dang, Josephine Diecke, Tereza Fischer, Sean Guynes, Adrian Martin, Regina Martin, Margrit Tröhler, Linda Waack, and, as always, Nadine Adler Spiegel. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the Privatdozenten- Stiftung of the University of Zurich and to the Swiss National Science Founda­ tion for their generous financial support, without which this volume would not have been possible. Making a book is often an unpredictable endeavor that, like a suspenseful movie, can surprise—or annoy—with unforeseen twists. The most unexpect­ ed, but ultimately very gratifying, turn that The Fear of Knowing took was becoming part of the publication series Pop: Kultur | Medien | Ästhetik edited by Daniel Illger and Christine Lötscher; without the latter the whole enter­ prise would never have gotten off the ground. Special thanks also to Marion Müller from Rombach Wissenschaft for shepherding me through all stages of the publication process. Simon Spiegel 16 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Filmography It Follows. Director: David Robert Mitchell. US 2014. No Time to Die. Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga. UK/US 2021. Once Upon a Time. Creator: Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. US 2011–2018. The Sixth Sense. Director: M. Night Shyamalan. US 1999. Survivor. Creator: Charlie Parsons. US 2000– . Too Old to Die Young. Creator: Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker. US 2019. WandaVision (US 2021, Creator: Jac Schaeffer) Works Cited Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. London, 1860. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Beacon Press, 2016. Introduction 17 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Simon Spiegel On the Origins of Spoilers Spoilers seem to be lurking everywhere these days. Or rather, not spoilers themselves, but spoilerphobia: the fear of encountering or producing a spoil­ er. Whether in newspaper reviews, social media posts or coffee break conver­ sations, over family dinners or after-work drinks, few things are as universally condemned nowadays as revealing too much about the latest Netflix series or superhero movie. Spoilers are ostracized, and no one seems surprised that film critics are routinely required to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to attend press screenings of blockbuster movies. Few people seem to be aware that things have not always been this way. And even fewer seem to think it is worth doing research on this subject, although it has significant implications for how we deal with narrative media. One of the few scholarly monographs on spoilers—if not the only one—is Richard Greene’s Spoiler Alert!. Greene argues that, while the concept of the spoiler is relatively new, spoilers have always existed. In other words, it has always been possible to divulge the outcome of a story in advance, even if there was no specific term for this activity. But although the act of spoiling is probably as old as storytelling itself, doing so has only become an issue in the last two or three decades. Spoiling, or rather the fear of a story being spoiled, is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the following pages, I will summarize the history of the modern spoiler, and then go over some basic concepts relevant to understanding how spoilers work. My goal is not to provide a complete history or theory of the spoiler, but rather to lay some foundations on which the other essays in this volume will build. As I will argue, spoilers are ultimately a social phenomenon and therefore, to understand them better, we need to look at how their function has developed over time. But first, a few words about the meaning of the term “spoiler.” There is no uniform understanding, especially across different fan groups, of what should be considered a spoiler.1 The most common usage refers to “advance information of what will happen in the plot” (Gray 20). While this definition sounds simple enough, upon closer inspection it is not very precise. What 1 On spoiler definitions, see Perks and McElrath-Hart. 19 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb exactly does the “advance information” refer to? Are we talking only about the ending—presumably a twist ending—as Benjamin K. Johnson and Judith E. Rosenbaum do, when they define spoilers as “premature and undesired information about how a narrative’s arc will conclude” (1069)? While this focus on plot denouement is common, it is not shared by everyone, and for good reason. One could argue that, in many films, the ending is a given, and the really interesting, unexpected things happen on the way to that ending, which is why Dengfeng Yan and Alex S. L. Tsang distinguish between process and outcome spoilers—a distinction to which I will return later. Others opt for an even broader understanding, deeming any information about what happens in a film (or novel) a spoiler, including extra-textual information such as genre labels. And some fans do not restrict the notion of spoilers to revealing plot elements, but also include almost any information about an upcoming movie, such as set photos, information about cameos, or even the soundtrack. There is also a lot of debate about whether advance information communicated through trailers, press releases, and interviews with the filmmakers should be considered spoilers, or whether these can be regarded as unproblematic since they are officially sanctioned as part of the film’s marketing campaign.2 What we see here is that spoilers are a subject of heated debate, and that almost everything about them—even their very definition—is up for discus­ sion. For the purposes of this chapter, I will mostly follow Grayʼs approach, which is the most widely used. Thus, my focus is primarily on important aspects of the plot, although I am well aware that there is no objective way of assessing the importance of any individual plot element. I will mostly focus on film, since there is much evidence that this medium plays a key role in the emergence of today’s spoiler culture. Spoiler History While a proper history of the spoiler has yet to be written, we can explain with some confidence when and, much more importantly, why the fear of spoilers as we know it today originated. As explained above, although the activity of spoiling is very old, “spoiling” as a commonly understood concept related to 2 For the role of trailers in the context of the spoiler discussion, see Milan Hain’s chapter. Simon Spiegel 20 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb fiction is fairly new.3 A useful tool to broadly trace the emergence of this new concept is Google’s Ngram Viewer, which can chart the use of a phrase across a dataset of 5.2 million scanned books. Searching for the term “spoiler” is in­ conclusive, though, as it has many different meanings across contexts—for in­ stance, in the fields of theology and aerodynamics, among others—that have nothing do with the reception of fiction. Searching for “spoiler alert,” in con­ trast, gives a clear result: Until the year 2000, the line is flat, right along the bottom at 0%. With the turn of the millennium, things suddenly change, and we see a distinct spike that, with some intermittent small dips, continues steadily until 2019, the last searchable year in the dataset (fig. 1). While this method only offers a rough approximation, the overall trajectory of the curve leaves no doubt: before the 2000s, no one was writing about spoiler alerts—at Fig. 1: The occurrence of the term “spoiler alert” in Google NGram 3 Limiting the discussion to fiction is certainly debatable, as there also are nonfictional forms prone to spoilers. We may not necessarily think of documentaries when we talk about spoil­ ers, but for genres like True Crime and, more generally, any kind of investigative documen­ tary, they are certainly a potential issue. At the same time, talking about “narrative content” also seems inappropriate since not everything that tells a story can be properly spoiled. Again, the case of the documentary is relevant here: most documentaries are narrative and tell a story. But we would not normally think of a documentary about WW2, an artist’s portrait, or a nature documentary as something that can be spoiled. Hybrid forms such as the reality TV show Survivor (US 2000– , Creator: Charlie Parsons), which Andrew Bumstead discusses in his chapter, as well as sporting events are also susceptible to spoilers. And finally, as the chapters by Andreas Rascher and Tobias Unterhuber in this volume attest, spoilers can be equally relevant in the context of games. On the Origins of Spoilers 21 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb least not in books—but then things change rather dramatically. Clearly, some­ thing happened around that time: but what? Before we look more closely at what happened, more fine-grained historical research is needed in order to complement Google Ngram’s broad statistical approach. The oldest known use of the term “spoiler” in its modern sense appears in the April 1971 issue of National Lampoon, an American humor magazine in the vein of Mad magazine which had its heyday in the 1970s. The satirical bent is apparent in the article in question, which is simply titled “Spoilers” (fig. 2). The supposed purpose of the piece by National Lampoon co-founder and chief editor Douglas C. Kenney, is described as follows: In more tranquil times, Americans loved nothing better than curling up with a blood-chilling whodunit or trooping off to the cinema to feast on spine-tingling thrillers, weird science fiction tales and hair-raising war adventure. Nowadays, however, with the country a seething caldron of racial, political and moral conflict, the average American has more excitement in his daily life than he can healthily handle […] For this reason, on the following pages the National Lampoon presents, as a public service, a selection of “spoilers” guaranteed to reduce the risk of unsettling and possibly dangerous suspense. (33) Over the next three and a half pages, Kenney presents a total of 89 spoilers, divided into various rubrics such as “Alfred Hitchcock,” “Thrillers,” “Agatha Christie,” “Campus Standards,” or “Classics.” Fig. 2: The first use of the term “spoiler” in National Lampoon Simon Spiegel 22 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Kenney’s article is obviously little more than a drawn-out joke. Nevertheless, two points are of interest for our purposes. The first is Kenney’s alleged aim: his spoilers are explicitly meant to reduce suspense, to relieve tension. Even more relevant is the fact that Kenney’s spoilers vary wildly in kind. They include what we might call classic examples, some of which will be covered later in this volume, for instance, Psycho (US 1960, Director: Alfred Hitch­ cock)—“The movie's multiple murders are committed by Anthony Perkins disguised as his long-dead mother” (33)—Les Diaboliques (Diabolique, FR 1955, Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot)—“Vera Clouzot’s husband isn’t really murdered. He and Simone Signoret staged it as part of a plot to drive his wife insane” (34)—Citizen Kane (US 1941, Director: Orson Welles)—“‘Rosebud’ was the name of Kaneʼs childhood sled” (35)—or Agatha Christie’s The Mur­ der of Roger Ackroyd (1926)—“The book’s narrator, Dr. Sheppard” (35). Then there are examples that basically consist of short quips, like the “Science Fiction Monsters” section, which simply lists the means by which the respective monster is ultimately destroyed; for example, “Flamethrowers” (Them! [US 1954, Director: Gordon Douglas]), “Freezing cold” (The Blob [US 1958, Director: Irvin Yeaworth]), or “3,000 volts” (The Thing from Another World [US 1951, Director: Christian Nyby]). One could debate whether knowing that the giant ants in Them! are killed with flamethrowers really constitutes a spoiler. Definitely not a spoiler is the line given for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866): “Raskolnikov did it” (36). It is not a revelation that the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel kills the old woman and her half-sister, since this happens at the very beginning and is what sets the story in motion. The National Lampoon article is generally considered the first use of the term in its current sense,4 although it is not clear whether this early coinage had any lasting impact. We only know of a few scattered instances of “spoiler” being used in the same way in subsequent years. While they may have been influenced by Kenney’s article, there is not enough evidence to construct a convincing lineage. Things only begin to pick up in the late 1970s, and here, two areas are of particular interest: the use of both the terms “spoiler” and “spoiler warning” or “spoiler alert” is well documented in both science fiction magazines and 4 It is also the earliest example listed in the OED, which added this specific meaning of spoiler in 2007. As Richter notes, technically, the first occurrence of “spoiler” is the March 1971 issue of National Lampoon, which contains a preview of the spoiler article to appear the following month (542). On the Origins of Spoilers 23 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb online discussions. Again, it is not clear whether these instances are related to the term’s first appearance in National Lampoon, but all evidence suggests that the term was more widely used in science fiction magazines at first and later spread to the digital world. According to a Tech Times article by Ben McCool, spoiler warnings were quite common in reviews in science fiction magazines in the late 1970s. Mc­ Cool specifically mentions Destinies, an anthology series published by science fiction writer Jim Baen between 1978 and 1981. While I was not able to examine all Destinies issues, I can verify that the term “spoiler” does appear in review columns by Spider Robinson as early as the first issue of Destinies, published in November/December 1978. The article features a very prominent insertion: “WARNING! I AM ABOUT TO COMMIT A SPOILER! IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE BOOK ENDS, SKIP THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH!” (Robinson 145). What stands out is that Robinson (or Baen as the editor) does not deem it necessary to explain what a spoiler is: a strong indication that the term was already in use by that point. Before he started writing for Destinies, Robinson was responsible for the Reviews section of Galaxy magazine, also under the editorship of Baen. In these reviews—starting with the August 1978 issue—Robinson uses the verb “to spoil” in its modern form several times, but not yet the nouns “spoiler” or “spoiler alert.” I am not suggesting that Robinson single-handedly popularized these terms; additional research in other magazines and especially fanzines would surely turn up more early examples.5 But Robinson’s writing clearly in­ dicates when spoiler terminology became common in science fiction fandom.6 Soon afterwards, spoiler warnings arrived in the digital world. In one of the earliest electronic mailing lists, the SF-LOVERS mailing list estab­ lished around 1975, the phrase “spoiler warning” came into frequent use around 1980. Two years later, it spread to Usenet, which was publicly estab­ lished in 1980. A message from June 8, 1982 in the newsgroup net.movies 5 Researching fanzines, which were often short-lived and published in small print runs, is notoriously difficult. A search of the Fanfiction Fanzine Collection at the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/fanzines-collection) yielded a review of Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast (1980) in the February 1980 issue of the Science Fiction Review as the earliest occurrence of “spoiler” in this specific corpus (Pinto 11). According to a note in the review, it is a reprint of an article that was originally published in another fanzine called Feetnotes, about which I found no information. Its author, Peter Pinto, was apparently an Englishman living in England, which is relevant insofar as it suggests that the term “spoiler” had already crossed the Atlantic by that time. 6 On the relationship between science fiction fandoms and spoilers, see also the interview with Adam Roberts. Simon Spiegel 24 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb discussing Spock’s death in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (US 1982, Director: Nicholas Meyer) prominently features the all capital phrase “[SPOILER ALERT].”7 It is probably no coincidence that these early examples occurred in a mail­ ing list dedicated to science fiction and in a Usenet post about a science fiction film, since fans of the genre were much more likely to already be familiar with the term by then. The fact that “spoiler alert” is used without explanation again suggests that the poster expected the audience to understand the mean­ ing of the phrase. In the following years, spoiler terminology proliferated across all of Usenet. It became so popular that, by the mid-1990s, most newsreader programs would interpret the so-called form feed character (^L or Ctrl+L), an ASCII control character for page breaks, as a “spoiler character,” which would cause the reader to automatically hide the following text; a function to insert a “spoiler character” became a standard feature. Today Usenet is a niche net­ work, and funnily enough, this function, which was considered essential in the late 1990s, is absent from current Usenet readers.8 Although spoiler warnings were fairly common in Usenet newsgroups in the mid-1990s, they were not yet a widespread phenomenon. Mainstream media did not yet seem to know about the perils of spoilers. We must not forget that private internet access was far from common at that time, and only a small minority of users, most probably at technical universities, was active in Usenet. And once net access became ubiquitous, most people did not engage in Usenet discussions but rather surfed the web. Most of the research on spoilers, outside of empirical research, has been conducted in the context of fan studies, and at least up until the early 2010s, research in this field conceptualized spoilers as an issue that almost exclusively concerns (digital) fandoms.9 As late as 2012, Matt Hills speaks of spoilers 7 Several authors claim that this was the first Usenet message mentioning spoilers, but as Tobias Unterhuber notes in his chapter, there are even earlier examples in games-related newsgroups. 8 Another method of marking spoilers that was well-established in the mid-1990s is the so- called “spoiler space” of multiple blank lines added before the potential spoiler. Some news­ group FAQs contained detailed rules on how many lines a spoiler space must contain (for the reference to this practice, my thanks go to my student Jean-Luc Rossé). Yet another way of hiding spoilers used already in the early 1980s is ROT13 encoding, a simple letter substitution cipher that replaces a letter with the 13th letter after it in the Latin alphabet. Again, encoding and decoding ROT13 was eventually considered a basic feature of a newsreader; see also Unterhuber’s chapter on this. 9 See, among others, Jenkins, Convergence Culture 25–58; Gray; Booth 103–25; Hills. Today, spoiling is generally considered a bad thing, but this negative connotation was not always On the Origins of Spoilers 25 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb as “a kind of fan cultural production” (111). This focus is understandable insofar as fandoms were indeed instrumental in establishing the idea of the spoiler, though when Hill was writing this, the concept had already begun to spread more widely. An instructive example is a New York Times article titled “The End of the Surprise Ending” by Emily Nussbaum, published May 9, 2004. In it, Nussbaum discusses what she sees as a new trend: the fact that entertainment websites such as Ain’t It Cool News or E! Online are publishing spoilers of popular television shows; much to the dismay of Joss Whedon, J. J. Abrams, and other prominent showrunners. Here, “spoiler” is in quotation marks the first time it is mentioned; clearly, the average reader was not yet expected to know the specific meaning of the term. This changed quickly: less than a year later, other New York Times articles mention spoilers without quotes. In summary, “spoiler” in its contemporary meaning was coined in the 1970s, proliferated in online communities over the two following decades, and finally went mainstream in the mid-2000s. The interesting question, of course, is why? What happened between 1980 and 2005 that ultimately changed the way we talk about fictional content? Complex Narratives The rise of spoilerphobia coincides with significant changes in both the kind of content produced by the film industry and how that content is distributed and viewed. For decades, the film industry followed the same model: films were shown in theaters, and then, years later, on television. Or people would watch TV shows at a specific time. This arrangement controlled what, when, and how a film or a show could be seen, and it led to a situation where everyone would essentially watch in lockstep. You saw a film either when it was in the theater or when it was on television. firmly established. For example, in Convergence Culture, published in 2006, Henry Jenkins discusses fans of the TV show Survivor who engage in spoiling. This is one of the earliest academic discussions of spoiling, and it is interesting to note that for Jenkins, the term “spoiler” refers primarily to the fans trying to gather information about the show’s winner and less to the piece of information they reveal. For Jenkins, spoiling is also not about diminishing someone’s experience, but rather a game played with the creators of the show, “an adversarial process—a contest between the fans and the producers, one group trying to get their hands on the knowledge the other is trying to protect” (43). Jenkins describes this (shared) activity mainly in positive terms, as “fun” and a “compelling practice” that is “empowering” (29); see also Andrew Bumstead’s chapter on Survivor. Simon Spiegel 26 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb This began to change in the mid-1990s. With the advent of DVD, pay- per-view channels, time-shifting technologies such as digital video recorders, and eventually streaming services, viewers gained increasing control over when to watch the film or series of their choice. “The traditional passive role of viewers-as-spectators, which asked audiences to submit themselves to the time-bound conditions and conventions of the cinematic screening, has been upgraded with more (inter-)active potential” (Kiss and Willemsen 13). Suddenly, it was not only possible to watch a movie multiple times, but also to rewind a scene or even freeze it and scrutinize individual frames. At the same time, the emerging world of the internet offered entirely new ways of finding kindred spirits with whom one could discuss the latest movie or episode of a series in great detail. The mode of reception changed drastically, and filmmakers reacted to the fact that they could now count on what Jason Mittell calls “forensic fandom,” that is, an active audience that would “embrace a detective mentality, seeking out clues, charting patterns and assembling evidence into narrative hypotheses and theories” (“Lost” 128–29; see also Mittell, Complex TV). This altered mode of perception is why the late 1990s and early 2000s saw a surge of movies that deviated from the straightforward classical plot such as The Usual Suspects (US 1995, Director: Bryan Singer), Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, DE 1998, Director: Tom Tykwer), The Sixth Sense (US 1999, Direc­ tor: M. Night Shyamalan), Fight Club (US 1999, Director: David Fincher), Memento (US 2000, Director: Christopher Nolan), Mulholland Drive (US/FR 2001, Director: David Lynch), Donnie Darko (US 2001, Director: Richard Kelly), Vanilla Sky (US 2001, Director: Cameron Crowe), or A Beautiful Mind (US 2001, Director: Ron Howard).10 As this small selection of films shows, it was not one specific feature that changed. While The Sixth Sense and Fight Club have comparable surprise endings, they are very different from Lola rennt, Mulholland Drive, or Donnie Darko. What unites all these examples is that they diverge from the 10 Mittell coined the term “forensic fandom” in the context of the TV show Lost (US 2004– 2010, Creator: Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof ); series are another area where we can trace the rise of complex narratives. One important forerunner in this devel­ opment is Twin Peaks (US 1990–1991, Creator: Mark Frost and David Lynch). Not only does Twin Peaks contain several elements that are considered typical of complex narratives, but it is also an early example of a show that attracted an active online community. The Usenet group alt.tv.twinpeaks “became one of the most active and prolific on the Usenet system, averaging one hundred or more entries per day during the peak months of the series’ initial American broadcast” (Jenkins, Textual Poachers 79). On the Origins of Spoilers 27 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb narrative patterns that dominated Hollywood for decades. The films play with basic structural elements and, above all, they are increasingly designed for an audience that would actively engage with them. There has been extensive research on this development in film studies, and scholars have come up with a plethora of terms to describe these new forms, including mind-game films, puzzle films, twist films, mind-tricking nar­ ratives, misdirection film, brainfuck films, mindfuck films, modular narrative, and complex narratives.11 These terms—and several others—are not entirely interchangeable; these scholars are not all drawing on the same corpus of films, instead often emphasizing specific aspects. But what they all have in common is that they signal a departure from established forms.12 For our purposes, it is not necessary to look at the various approaches in detail. What is important here is that many of these complex narratives, as I will call them, feature some unexpected variation on the classical model. It may be that the main character is—unbeknownst to them as well as the audience—either dead or imaginary, that everything happens in a kind of time loop or is repeated several times, or that the movie tells its story in a non-chronological way. The films are, in the words of Thomas Elsaesser, “playing games […] with the audience’s (and the characters’) perception of reality” (14). There is always some deviation from well-established narrative forms, some kind of twist or trick—there is, in other words, always something that can be spoiled.13 This change is crucial. When we look at classical Hollywood movies, there is not usually much to spoil, at least not in terms of the outcome. It is not really a surprise that a Western ends with John Wayne shooting the bad guy, that the lovers will eventually be united in a romantic comedy, and that, at 11 See, among others, Elsaesser; Buckland; Cameron; Kiss and Willemsen; Mittell, Complex TV; Klecker; Friedman. 12 There is a long, but ultimately not very productive discussion of whether complex narratives represent a radical departure from the established norms of classical Hollywood or rather, as David Bordwell prominently argues, merely “legible variants on well-entrenched strategies for presenting time, space, goal achievement, causal connection, and the like” (The Way, 75). 13 While this change in narrative patterns has doubtlessly taken place, there is a danger of overgeneralizing this development. Steven Johnson, for example, argues in Everything Bad is Good for You that mass culture in general has become more complex and more cognitively demanding over the past three or four decades. Whether this is a general trend that can be observed beyond a comparatively small group of works is at least debatable. Once you look beyond prestige productions, for example at Hallmark Channel movies or daytime TV series, there are still a lot of unimaginative run-of-the-mill productions without any narrative complexity. Simon Spiegel 28 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb least until very recently, James Bond will not die. With the complex narratives that emerged in the late 1990s, we can no longer count on any of these former certainties. But there were not just many more films prone to being spoiled, there was also a substantial change in the way people talked about movies. As early as 2001, several years before the first social media platforms appeared, researchers described what they called “incidental news exposure” caused by online news portals. In a traditional understanding of media, news consump­ tion is the result of a conscious choice. I read a newspaper article or watch a TV show because I want to. This has changed with the rise of online media. “The Web may be unique in its ability to provide a typical user with an array of information choices that extend far beyond what he or she intentionally seeks” (Tewksbury et al. 534). This development has, of course, intensified massively since the early days of the Web. Social networks such as Facebook, X, or TikTok encourage their users to post short, snappy content. Scrolling through Facebook or X, we are constantly exposed to “incidental news.” Brevi­ ty is the name of the game: Because a tweet is so short, we can absorb it at a glance. It is virtually impossible to not read a tweet.14 These developments reinforce each other when it comes to spoilers. Not only is there more content that can potentially be spoiled; because everyone watches at a different pace, I can also never be sure if the person I am talking to has already seen the latest season of the hit show I just binge-watched yesterday. In pre-digital days, talking about last night’s TV show during a coffee break was not yet a risky proposition. You could be pretty sure that anyone interested in the show had seen it as well. And if someone did not want to hear what you had to say, they could just walk away. None of that is possible anymore. There is no synchronized schedule, so everyone has a different level of knowledge. And with social media, it is not only possible to reach a worldwide audience instantly, it has also become almost impossible to avoid incidental exposure. For about a quarter of a century, various fan communities developed a spoiler discourse, but this discourse remained a niche phenomenon. There was simply no need for it in a world where most films were predictable anyway, and where everyone was on the same schedule. A fundamental change in the media system had to happen for this discourse to become more widespread. The developments of the 1990s affected all levels of media 14 Of course, there are also long X threads and extensive Facebook posts, but they’re not the norm. On the Origins of Spoilers 29 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb production and consumption. It was a change in the kind of media that is produced, in the way it is distributed and received, and also in how, when and where we talk about it. Once this shift occurred, the mainstream was quick to adopt the nomenclature and protocols that had already been established in online communities. It is no coincidence, then, that the fear of spoilers spread at the exact moment it did. It was caused by very specific developments that affected almost every aspect of media production, distribution, and reception. Looking back in history, though, this is not the first time such a change has occurred. As James Green shows in his chapter, a similar shift took place in the mid-19th century. Although the term “spoiler” was not in use back then, the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in book form in 1860 marked a com­ parable change in content, distribution, and reception, and was accompanied by discussions very similar to those of today. Genres As mentioned at the beginning, Richard Greene argues that for as long as there have been movies, novels, or plays, it has also been possible to give away the ending in advance: We can easily imagine, for example, some citizen of Athens in 429 b.c.e. leaving the Theater of Dionysus on the opening night of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King shouting “OMG, Oedipus slept with his own mother!” (or something along those lines). This can’t be verified, but it would be shocking if things like this didn’t happen (there have been jerks for considerably longer than there have been things to spoil). (Greene 4–5) Greene gives this example half-jokingly, but it is worth looking at it more closely, because he has it completely wrong. While our knowledge of the actual practice of Attic theater is sketchy, we can state with some certainty that audiences watching Sophocles’s play for the first time would not have been surprised by what Greene deems a spoiler. After all, Oedipus Rex was not an original story invented by Sophocles but rather his adaptation of a much older myth. And if we look at how the play tells Oedipus’s backstory, i.e., how he ends up killing his father and marrying his mother, it is clear that this is in no way meant to surprise the audience; the only one who is not aware of these events is Oedipus himself (cp. Storm 5–6). In the play, Oedipus sets out to avenge a murder that, according to an oracle, is the cause of a plague ravaging the city of Thebes. He vows to find the murderer, whatever the consequences, completely unaware that he himself is Simon Spiegel 30 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb the culprit. Even to an audience member who may not know anything about Oedipus’s early life, the play makes it clear that this promise is a bad idea, and that it will have terrible consequences for Oedipus himself. Oedipus Rex is, after all, a tragedy. What’s more, in his Poetics, Aristotle declares it the paradigmatic example of a tragedy: an assessment that would influence the way the genre would be conceived for millennia to come. Greene is a philosopher by training and not a scholar of literature, which might explain why he seems oblivious to the fact that genres are defined, among other things, by the expectations they raise. In the case of the tragedy, it is, in the words of Aristotle, about “a man […] who falls into adversity not through vice or depravity but because he errs in some way” (32). Telling someone that things will not turn out well for the protagonist of Oedipus Rex is about as much of a spoiler as giving away that a Western will feature men on horses wearing Stetson hats.15 We know that there is no happy ending for the protagonist of a tragedy; for centuries, writers did not think it was a problem to say so early on. A striking example is the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. It takes Shakespeare merely six lines to firmly establish that this story will not end well, and that we will witness “a pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.” Baz Luhrman, in his 1996 adaptation Romeo + Juliet (US/MX/AU/CA 1996, Director: Baz Luhrman), drives this point home forcefully: the line is first read by a news anchor, then repeated by a voice-over that, as we later learn, belongs to the priest, and at the same time displayed on the screen in huge letters (fig. 3a–b). We can speculate as to why we enjoy Romeo and Juliet, a play that is so much a part of Western culture that even people who have never seen or read it know that “there never was a story of more woe,” as the film’s (and the play’s) final line has it. Perhaps it is our irrational wish that, at least this one time, against all likelihood, the lovers will miraculously make it. Whatever the reason, the fact that our prior knowledge in no way diminishes our enjoyment indicates that not all genres are equally spoilable.16 15 Dana Steglich also discusses the example of Oedipus Rex in her chapter, but has a rather different take on it. 16 Although I’ve discussed two plays, Romeo and Juliet and Oedipus Rex, as examples, it is interesting to note that the realm of theater seems to be largely unaffected by spoiler discourse. There is the famous example of Agatha Christie’s murder mystery The Mousetrap (1952), where the audience is asked not to reveal the twist ending, but plays such as Christie’s in many ways represent a bygone era of theater. In contemporary productions, spoiler warnings are virtually unheard of. The main reason for this is probably that modern On the Origins of Spoilers 31 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Fig. 3a–b: Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet What is true for the classic tragedy holds equally for a much younger and more cheerful genre, the romantic comedy. Whether Cary Grant and Ros­ alind Russell in His Girl Friday (US 1940, Director: Howard Hawks), Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (US 1954, Director: William Wyler), or Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally (US 1989, Director: Rob Reiner), one thing we know about all these films— and many, many more—is that the two leads will end up together. There are exceptions to this rule, like My Best Friend’s Wedding (US 1997, Direc­ tor: P. J. Hogan), where Julia Roberts’s character has to content herself with dancing with her gay best friend—who is at least played by a dashing Rupert Everett—but these rare cases are just that: rarities. theater is much more concerned with the experience of presence than with telling a story; see also the interview with Joshua Astrachan. Simon Spiegel 32 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb As in tragedy, the outcome of a romantic comedy is never seriously in doubt. Ultimately, this is true for most of popular cinema. Be it the classic Western, a typical whodunit, or basically all action movies: no matter how big the obstacles, the hero will ultimately prevail. We can even go further: a classic genre like the Western is so highly conventionalized that we can correctly predict its plot to an astonishing degree. A little test I do with my students is to show them the beginning of Shane (US 1953, Director: George Stevens), where the eponymous protagonist enters the frame from the horizon and meets the inhabitants of a farm (fig. 4a–d). I then ask them who this character is, where he comes from, and what will happen to him. I specifically use the example of Shane for this exercise, because it is a condensation of all Western tropes—which is why Will Wright, in his influential study Sixguns and Society, calls it “the classic of the classic Westerns” (34). Still, it is always amazing to see that my students, very few of whom have ever seen a Western made before the 1970s, never fail to predict the movie’s plot with remarkable accuracy. They know exactly what to expect from a classic Western, even though most of them have never seen one. Fig. 4a–d: The opening of Shane On the Origins of Spoilers 33 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb The constant reuse of established tropes, and the fact that we know in advance much of what is going to happen: these elements are constitutive of genre cinema and of popular cinema in general. In fact, one might argue that even plot twists have by now become an expected element of popular films and— especially—series. Plot twists are an important element of complex narratives, but what is rarely discussed in this context is that there are very different kinds of twists. In Twist Endings, Willem Strank develops a detailed typology of endings; for our purposes, only his distinction between plot twists and twist endings is relevant. Plot twists can occur at any given point in the plot; when they happen at the end, Strank calls them final plot twists. But not every final plot twist is a twist ending. For Strank, the latter represents a very specific kind of twist that retroactively changes the premises of the fictional universe, the paradigmatic examples being the endings of The Sixth Sense and Fight Club—where we realize, respectively, that the Bruce Willis character was dead all along and that Tyler Durden is merely an emanation of the main character’s split personality (30–51). Strank emphasizes that twist endings fundamentally change our under­ standing of a film, that they force us to reassess everything we have seen. For Cornelia Klecker, this is also an essential quality of what she calls “mind-trick­ ing narratives.” They “hold back some vital information until the very end of the film. The instant this piece of information is finally revealed, the audience will experience the ultimate epiphany” (12). Seth Friedman looks at a similar corpus of—in his terminology–misdirection films, which “provoke spectators to understand narrative information initially in one manner and subsequently comprehend it in drastically new ways” (1–2). Thus, all three authors are interested in films in which a twist ending leads to the subsequent realization that the world of the film follows different rules than we initially thought. Much of the discussion about complex narratives focuses on twist endings, even though this type only makes up a fraction of complex narratives. Regular plot twists are much more common, such as the unexpected deaths of major characters in Game of Thrones (US 2011–2019, Creator: David Benioff and D. B. Weiss), or the moment when the supposedly senile old man in the first season of Squid Game (SK 2021– , Creator: Hwang Dong-hyuk) turns out to be the inventor of the titular deadly contest. A thriller series like Damages (US 2007–2012, Creator: Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman) or Big Little Lies (US 2017–2019, Creator: David E. Kelley), on the other hand, does offer a final plot twist at the end of each season, but not a twist ending. In these cases, the final twist only resolves the mystery of the central Simon Spiegel 34 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb murder, but does not alter the rules of the world and therefore does not force us to re-evaluate everything that has happened before.17 Although Klecker’s study is titled Spoiler Alert!, she only touches briefly on spoilers when discussing audience expectations regarding twists. According to her, “the mere knowledge that there will be a twist—without actually knowing what exactly it is—greatly tampers with the enjoyment of a film since it completely changes the viewer’s expectations” (132). I agree with Klecker that the very expectation of a twist can alter the viewing experience, and that the twist ending of a film like The Sixth Sense works best for an unsuspecting viewer.18 But I would argue that in today’s media landscape, this expectation is essentially a given. According to Friedman, misdirection films peaked in 2010 and have since fizzled out (231). It is indeed true that recent series as diverse as Game of Thrones, Big Little Lies, or Severance (US 2022– , Creator: Dan Erick­ son), while undoubtedly twist-heavy, rarely attempt to provide an “ultimate epiphany” in the sense of Klecker. The fact that they employ major plot twists does not come as a surprise, but can rather be seen as a convention in its own right. It may well be that the era of misdirection or mind-tricking films is essentially over, because today’s audiences are simply too much aware of potential twists.19 17 Bordwell proposes a distinction between “story world twists and narrational ones” (Perplex­ ing Plots 376). Whereas the former type involves “a discrete incident that violates our expec­ tations” (376), the latter “violates an informational norm and suppresses basic premises about the story world” (377). I find this nomenclature rather counterintuitive, since story world twists, despite their name, are not about the setup of the story world. Nor do I agree with Bordwell’s assessment that Psycho, which he cites as an example, has two narrational twists, the death of Marion Crane and the revelation of the killer’s true identity. I would argue that these are rather different kinds of twists. The former is a surprise, but it does not retroactively change what has happened before. The realization that Norman Bates is the murderer, on the other hand, makes us see the events of the film in a different light. Strank does not consider the ending of Psycho to be a twist ending though, since it only affects one aspect of the plot about which we have been misled, but does not fundamentally change our understanding of the fictional world as does the ending of Fight Club (50–51). Despite this difference, he nonetheless holds that Psycho’s two big twists are very different in nature. 18 See Matthias Brütsch’s chapter for a detailed analysis of The Sixth Sense. 19 Strank, whose study was published three years before Friedman’s, and whose most recent examples are from 2012, sees no decline in twist endings. Whichever assessment is correct, it is certainly true that twist endings, which are often considered central to complex narratives, are much less common in series. There is at least one obvious reason for this: when a series runs over several seasons, a twist ending that turns everything that has happened before upside down is almost impossible (if only because most series do not have all seasons planned out in advance). On the Origins of Spoilers 35 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb At this point, we could say that no matter whether we are talking about classical Hollywood or contemporary productions, we are always dealing with highly conventionalized forms of storytelling that ultimately proceed along expected lines. But if that is true, it obviously begs the question of how or to what extent a piece of Hollywood entertainment can be spoiled effectively. The common assumption behind the fear of spoilers—which is already the basis of Kenney’s National Lampoon article, albeit for ostensibly opposite pur­ poses—is that too much advance knowledge is detrimental to the enjoyment of a movie because it destroys suspense. To better understand what is at stake when we talk about spoilers, we must now delve into the theory of suspense. Suspense The academic discussion of suspense is wide-ranging. In fact, what is com­ monly called suspense encompasses a range of phenomena on multiple levels, and various theoretical traditions deal with it differently. In what follows, I make no attempt to cover this field exhaustively. Rather, my goal is to look at certain aspects of suspense that are particularly pertinent with regard to spoilers.20 One possible distinction—which is similar to the one between outcome and process spoilers—is between what and how (or why) suspense (Pütz 15). In other words: whether the suspense concerns the outcome of a sequence of events—what will happen—or whether the focus is on how the events will unfold. In the case of the romantic comedy, the emphasis is almost entirely on the how. That the lovers will end up together is never in jeopardy; what inter­ ests us is how they will get there. Or to be more precise, the true attraction of a romantic comedy lies in the obstacles that serve to delay the happy union. Tragedy works differently in this respect. As in a romantic comedy, we know how things will turn out, but the effect this knowledge has on our experience is starkly different. Central to the mood of a tragedy is what is commonly known as dramatic irony, a narrative setup in which the audience knows something vital to the character’s endeavor of which that character is unaware.21 20 For overviews, see Lehmann 45–100; Vorderer et al.; see also the chapter by Albrecht Koschorke. 21 William Storm describes dramatic irony as the “dissonance between what the audience may see and the limitations of the character’s own self-awareness” (5–6). It is no coincidence Simon Spiegel 36 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb A specific form of dramatic irony that has been much discussed in film studies is Hitchcockian suspense. In the oft-cited example of the bomb under the table that Alfred Hitchcock invokes in his conversation with François Truffaut, we have an advantage over the characters: we have seen the terrorist plant it, while the characters are completely oblivious to the imminent danger. This advantage—knowing about the threat that the protagonists are blissfully unaware of—is what makes the scene suspenseful (Truffaut 73). Since this kind of suspense depends on the audience’s additional knowl­ edge, Hitchcock recommends “that whenever possible the public must be in­ formed” (73). This seems to contradict the notion that too much information destroys suspense. Contrary to the common conception, it is not uncertain­ ty but rather our knowledge advantage that creates suspense in this setup. Indeed, one could even argue that Hitchcockian suspense cannot be spoiled at all, since our knowledge of something the characters are unaware is precisely what creates suspense. A possible objection to this argument could be that, although we know about the bomb, we do not know whether it will go off. As long as this uncer­ tainty persists and the fate of the characters is in doubt, we still experience suspense. As compelling as this argument may sound, I still think it is wrong. In fact, I would argue that most forms of suspense do not at all depend on an overall story arc, at least not in the sense that knowing the end of that arc would greatly affect our experience of suspense. Here I will discuss two very different examples to illustrate my point. The Belgian-French film A perdre la raison (Our Children, BE/FR 2012, Director: Joachim Lafosse) tells the story of Murielle, a woman who suffers from depression because she feels increasingly trapped in her oppres­ sive marriage. Finally, in an act of desperation and helplessness, she kills her four children and then tries to commit suicide. The film covers the whole of Murielle’s marriage; we first see her and her boyfriend Mounir, how she happily agrees to marry him, and then how she becomes more and more entrapped by her husband and his fatherly friend André. Director Joachim Lafosse tells this story, which is loosely based on a real-life incident, in chronological order, except for a prologue that anticipates the tragic ending. The film opens with Murielle in the hospital, pale and at the end of her tether, begging someone who is only visible as a dark outline in the foreground that “they” should be buried in Morocco and that “their father” should be that he specifically refers to Oedipus Rex, since he also considers Sophocles’s play a prime example of this mode. On the Origins of Spoilers 37 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb informed (fig. 5a). This is followed by a scene in which a visibly shaken Mounir embraces André. The prologue ends with a shot of an airplane at an airport; four small coffins are being loaded into the cargo hold on a conveyor belt (fig. 5b). Fig. 5a–b: The prologue of A perdre la raison This opening firmly establishes that all of Murielle’s children will die while she will survive. Thus, we know right from the beginning that the film will end terribly, and the only question is how we will get to that terrible ending. This is the classic tragic setup, and as in a tragedy, knowing the ending is not a problem but, on the contrary, intensifies the emotional effect.22 Much of the film’s impact stems from our awareness of the looming catas­ trophe. Just before the end, we see Murielle in a shopping mall. Compared to earlier scenes, she seems quite composed. She carries two boxes of cake, picks 22 Lafosse himself has likened his film to “a Greek tragedy” (in Dawson 59). Simon Spiegel 38 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb up a DVD, and then turns to another shelf where she chooses a large kitchen knife. Here, her behavior seems odd: she spends too much time selecting the knife, looks around several times for no apparent reason, and then hides the knife in her purse. We then see her at the checkout counter paying for everything but the knife. Clearly, Murielle has now collected everything she needs to murder her children, but in and of itself, the scene is not very remarkable. It is even some­ what implausible. First, Murielle would probably already own a large knife. Second, people buy large knives every day, so there would be no reason for her to steal it. In a way, the scene is very artificial and only exists to underscore that something important is going on. Its function is foreshadowing for the next scene, the event to which the whole film has been heading. But few viewers will raise this or similar objections. At this point, we have a clear idea of what is to come and are fully engaged. Our knowledge of what is going to happen charges the scene with meaning and turns it into a very intense moment. The next scene marks the emotional climax of the film. Murielle picks up her youngest child while his sisters are watching TV—presumably the new DVD—and eating cake. She leaves the room with the baby in her arms and goes upstairs. In the next shot, we see the three remaining sisters in front of the TV. Off-screen, Murielle calls the second-youngest child, who leaves the room and also climbs up the stairs (fig. 6a–b). This procedure is repeated twice. One by one, the girls are called by their mother and leave the room. Again, watched in isolation, this would be an unremarkable scene since nothing much happens. We do not see the murders; the drama unfolds entire­ ly off-screen. But even though we do not see or hear anything out of the ordinary, this is a moment of almost unbearable intensity. We know exactly what awaits these sweet girls as they unsuspectingly follow their mother’s call. We know, to return to Hitchcock’s example, of the bomb under the table, and we even know that it will go off. This does not diminish the scene’s emotional impact; on the contrary, the scene derives its power from the fact that we already know the outcome. My other example is Touching the Void (UK 2003, Director: Kevin Macdonald), which tells the true story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, two mountaineers who nearly died attempting to ascend a previously unclimbed mountain face in the Peruvian Andes. The climb proves much harder than expected, and during the descent in a storm, Joe falls and breaks his leg. Simon tries to lower his companion with ropes, but eventually finds himself in a desperate situation where he either has to cut the rope holding Joe or On the Origins of Spoilers 39 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb plummet with him. He cuts the rope, and after suffering through a night of sub-freezing temperatures, searches in vain for his partner. Concluding that Joe must be dead, Simon makes his way back to the base camp. Joe, however, has survived. With a broken leg and no food or water, he manages to climb out of the crevasse into which he fell, and spends the next three days crawling back to camp in terrible pain. He arrives just in time: Simon and Richard Hawking, a non-climber who had remained in camp, are just about to return to civilization. The story of Touching the Void is as full of high kinetic drama as any action movie. However, it is not a work of fiction inspired by true events, like A perdre la raison, but a hybrid in which long sequences of dramatized action are framed by interviews with the real-life protagonists. So we see two versions of each character: the real Simon, Joe, and Richard, recalling their stories, and actors re-enacting the events. These two strands of the film are staged and shot for maximum contrast. On the one hand, we have a series of Fig. 6a–b: The almost unbearable climax of A perdre la raison Simon Spiegel 40 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb talking heads in a very reduced studio setting, where the trio tell their stories with typical English understatement. The re-enactments, on the other hand, are elaborately staged scenes employing all the stylistic devices we know from adventure-laden feature films. While the re-enacted scenes do not look like a typical documentary, they do not feel like a regular feature film either. There is an artificial quality to them, especially when the focus is not on the mechanics of climbing. This impression is reinforced by the lack of dialogue. Except for screams, grunts, and other primal sounds, the characters are silent; the only spoken words we hear are the voice-over explanations from the interviews commenting on what is happening in the scene. This way, we are constantly reminded that what we are seeing is not what actually happened, but a mere illustration; thereby never allowing these sections to develop narrative or temporal indepen­ dence but always keeping them as action spaces which were partly memory spaces, from which the spoken narratives of testimony recollection departed and returned. (Corner 93) This leads to interesting effects with regard to potential spoiling. Since Joe is the narrator of his part of the story, we are aware that he must have survived his ordeal. Whether he falls nearly 150 feet or is convinced that he will die on the last night of his journey back, the audience never doubts that he will survive. But that constant reminder that he must have made it out of that hell alive in no way diminishes the drama. If anything, the interviews serve as a means of “iterative authentication” (Austin 76), underscoring that what we are witnessing is not just a piece of entertainment but a faithful reconstruction of a real event.23 As Dirk Eitzen argues, although we often think of documentaries as an in­ tellectual and detached genre—Bill Nichols speaks of a “discourse of sobriety” (36)—they are in some ways more emotional than works of fiction, since they affect us directly on a physical level. Because what happens on the screen is read as real, there is a strong sense that one should intervene. We want to do something, we want to right the wrong, but we are helpless because we are just watching past events that cannot be changed. Eitzen describes this awareness as a very physical experience that touches us deeply on an affective-emotional level. This is certainly true of Touching 23 An empirical study by Thomas Austin confirms this: “Viewer investments in its re-enacted narrative appear to have been strengthened by the verifying function of the accompanying interview material” (79). On the Origins of Spoilers 41 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb the Void. Knowing that Joe is not going to die does not lessen the tension we experience as we see him fight his way out of the crevasse under great pain. On the contrary, the combination of interviews and re-enacted scenes adds a sense of authenticity. Knowing that this really happened, that someone actually lived through this ordeal heightens the suspense and the overall emotional impact. Touching the Void and A perdre la raison are two very different films, in terms of genre and narrative structure, as well as tonally and in the emotional-affective experience they seek to provide. In both cases, the end is revealed early on, but it affects our experience differently in each case. Touching the Void offers very suspenseful moments despite our knowing the outcome; A perdre la raison, by contrast, is emotionally intense because we know what will happen. Obviously, these two examples do not cover the entire spectrum of cine­ matic suspense; there are various others forms, which work differently. But taken together, they clearly show that knowing the outcome of a story does not necessarily lessen our experience as viewers. The moment when Simon cuts the rope and lets his friend fall into what we would normally presume is certain death is very intense; our knowledge of the outcome of the endeavor does not change that. What we are dealing with here is related to a phenomenon known as the “paradox of suspense.” As noted above, many theories of suspense—including those that fuel the fear of spoilers—are based on the assumption that suspense depends on uncertainty. We supposedly experience suspense when a scene has multiple possible outcomes, one of which corresponds to what the narra­ tive frames as desirable. Or as Noël Carroll puts it, “one of the alternative outcomes is morally correct but improbable” (261). There are several problems with this idea. For one thing, there are count­ less examples where we experience suspense even though what is at stake is by no means “morally correct”; we can also experience suspense when the villain is in jeopardy (more on this later). But the issue that has caused the most discussion is the problem of repeated viewings. As we all know from our own experience, truly suspenseful films remain suspenseful across multiple viewings, which should not happen if suspense really depended on the uncertainty of the outcome.24 24 On the question of re-reading, see also the chapter by Dana Steglich. Simon Spiegel 42 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb Various explanations have been suggested for this paradox. As Richard J. Gerrig argues the fact that we can repeatedly experience suspense “reflects a systematic failure of memory processes to produce relevant knowledge as a narrative unfolds” (172). In other words, although we know about the outcome, we are not able to access this information while we watch a film (or read a novel). Carroll proceeds along slightly different lines, arguing that, although we know how a film will end, we are still able to imagine a different outcome. “The audience may not believe that the relevant outcome is uncer­ tain or improbable but, nevertheless, the audience may entertain the thought that the relevant outcome is uncertain or improbable” (267). According to Carroll, deeming an outcome improbable is sufficient for reintroducing the uncertainty necessary for suspense. Frankly, I find these explanations rather baffling. I already find it hard to accept that I should be unable to remember the outcome of a movie on its second viewing, but to suggest that I somehow forget that the protagonists of Touching the Void are still alive while I watch the film seems patently ab­ surd to me. Gerrig and Carroll go to great lengths to maintain the central role of uncertainty in creating suspense, while examples like Touching the Void or A perdre la raison clearly suggest otherwise. But instead of accepting that uncertainty is not a necessary condition for suspense and consequently thinking about what this could mean for a theory of suspense, they cling to the notion of uncertainty and try to save it with ever more intricate theoretical constructions. Aaron Smuts resolutely rejects the notion that suspense requires uncertain­ ty, instead proposing what he calls the “desire-frustration theory of suspense.” At the heart of this concept is the idea that we, as the audience, often strongly wish for a particular outcome, but since we are watching a movie, we are unable to intervene. This futile desire is what creates suspense, according to Smuts (he also cites the example of Touching the Void). “Suspenseful situations are those where we want to affect an outcome—that is, where we strongly desire to have a causal impact—but our desire is frustrated” (284).25 I find this model much more compelling, since it does not depend on our ignorance of the outcome and thus explains why suspense can occur in a film like Touching the Void. It is also consistent with how tragedy works. As indicated earlier, we do indeed want Romeo and Juliet to survive and are 25 This line of argument is quite similar to Eitzen’s when he talks about the emotional impact of documentaries. Eitzen basically confirms that Smuts’s desire-frustration theory is particu­ larly apt for explaining moments of suspense in nonfiction films. On the Origins of Spoilers 43 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb frustrated to see their plan fail; and we equally want to scream at Murielle not to go through with her horrible plan. One problem with Smuts’s approach, however, is that it only accounts for situations in which we wish for a good outcome. While he does not go as far as Carroll, who claims that suspense is always about the “morally correct” ending,26 he states that “one must have a strong desire to make it turn out the way one wants” (284), which definitely implies that our (frustrated) desire is aligned with the hero’s goals. Hitchcock strongly disagrees with this notion and, returning to the example of the bomb under the table, argues that “the apprehension of the bomb is more powerful than the feelings of sympathy or dislike for the characters involved” (Truffaut 73). Since I have now invoked him several times as a theorist of suspense, it seems appropriate to look at two of Hitchcock’s films to illustrate his point. Strangers on a Train (US 1951) and Frenzy (UK 1971) feature similar scenes in which the villain is at risk of losing an important piece of evidence that would prove the falsely suspected hero’s innocence. In Strangers on a Train, the sinister Bruno wants to plant a cigarette lighter belonging to the protagonist as false evidence, but accidentally drops it in a storm drain. In Frenzy, Rusk needs to get hold of a tiepin that threatens to identify him as the murderer; unfortunately, it is stuck in the tightly-clenched fist of his latest victim. In both examples, our sympathies are very clear: we do not want either Bruno or Rusk to succeed. But even though our overall allegiance is not with the villains, we are very much involved with them in both scenes. In Strangers on a Train, Bruno reaches down through the grid and tries to grab the lighter. A close-up shows his outstretched hand approaching it, finally grabbing it, but then, because his grip is not tight enough, dropping it. This procedure is repeated with the lighter sliding even further down the drain. Again, we see Bruno’s hand, now in an even tighter close-up, getting close to the lighter, touching it with his fingertips and then somehow getting a grip on it. Both attempts are intercut with close-ups of Bruno’s increasingly tense face (fig. 7a–d). The scene in Frenzy plays out similarly, though over an extended period of time. Rusk is already exhausted from having to get the body, which is stiff from rigor mortis, out of a potato sack. He can clearly see the pointed end 26 Carroll acknowledges that a character’s morality depends largely on the value system estab­ lished by the film and may not correspond to a real-life ethics. Nevertheless, he sticks to the basic idea that suspense depends on (positive) moral evaluation. Simon Spiegel 44 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb of the pin sticking out of the dead woman’s fist. Simply pulling it out of her hand does not work though, nor does opening the fist; the stiff fingers will not budge. After another failed attempt, which leads to Rusk breaking off the blade of his pocketknife, he finally ends up breaking every single finger of the dead woman’s hand until he finally reaches the pin (fig. 8a–f). Both scenes, which are typical of Hitchcock (though not an example of what he considers suspense), are very intense and affect us directly on a physical level. Seeing the two men’s faces strained with effort, witnessing Bruno desperately stretching his arm but being unable to reach the lighter, and observing Rusk’s sweaty hand slipping from the needle evokes an almost bodily response. We suffer with them and seem to feel what they feel. We all know the sensation Rusk experiences when he fumbles with his pocketknife, and when he repeatedly fails to open the blade, we want to step in and help him. Fig. 7a–d: Bruno tries to get hold of the lighter On the Origins of Spoilers 45 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb In both examples, we experience frustrated desire, but the desire is completely at odds with our overall sympathies.27 Although we do not want the villains to succeed, we are still firmly on their side for the duration of the scene.28 What these examples show is that suspense is not necessarily a narrative phenomenon, at least not in the sense that it relies on an overall plot. Obvi­ Fig. 8a-f: Rusk tries to get hold of the tiepin 27 There is a long-standing and complex discussion in film studies and beyond about the spectator’s sympathetic and empathetic engagement with fictional characters, which I will not enter into, since my point is that the forms of suspense I examine do not require any kind of overall engagement with a character. 28 Margrethe Bruun Vaage agrees “that the spectator can sometimes feel with characters inde­ pendently of her moral evaluation of them, or independently of whether she has also first sympathized with them” (66). Vaage is interested in why we root for deeply flawed characters like Breaking Bad’s (US 2008–2013, Creator: Vince Gilligan) Walter White. She argues that Carroll and Gerrig have it backwards when it comes to the relationship between suspense and our attitude toward a character; it is not so much “the spectator’s sympathetic allegiance Simon Spiegel 46 10.5771/9783988581150 - am 06.11.2025, 12:25:06. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb - Open Access - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783988581150 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/de/agb ously, we need to understand the situation the respective character is in and what he is trying to accomplish. But both scenes also work when watched in isolation: their suspense is fundamentally independent of the bigger plot. In these cases it is a “local” and, above all, an affective-corporeal phenomenon that has much more to do with rhythm, editing, sound, and how we engage with a character than with an all-encompassing story arc. For the suspense of these two scenes, but also for the kind of “cliffhanger” suspense we experi­ ence in Touching the Void, somatic empathy with the respective character, that is engagement on a basic bodily level, is key. Watching someone do or experience something strenuous or painful puts us in a state of tension and excitement, regardless of their goal and the overall outcome. Hitchcock deliberately uses a lot of close-ups and, in the case of Frenzy, lets us hear Rusk’s heavy breathing and other sounds of exertion: all elements that create suspense in a very primal way.29 As I said earlier, what we commonly call “suspense” covers a wide range of phenomena, and one problem with discussing both suspense and spoilers is that we often lump together things that, on closer inspection, work quite differently.30 Thus, I am not suggesting that somatic empathy is the key to all forms of suspense. Rather, my point is that somatic empathy, frustrated de­ with the antihero making suspense for him possible, as suspenseful situations being used in order to encourage, and maintain, sympathy for the antihero” (Vaage, The Antihero 65). 29 Unfortunately, Christine N. Brinckmann’s excellent article on somatic empathy, which ana­ lyzes the scene in Frenzy in detail, is only available in German. Vaage uses a similar term, “bodily empathy”, to describe a state that “g