One of the worst things about writing on the Internet is that your work is dependent on the whims of multinational corporations to stay online. I’ll be presenting pieces that were published elsewhere and are now no longer readable here. This piece was originally done for SyFy Wire in 2017. If you enjoy it, you can tip me here.
Warning: this article contains spoilers.
Quick question for you, dear educated and savvy reader: when do you think the first spoiler warning was used on the Internet? Don’t Wikipedia it, just guess.
Got it? Get ready for a surprise.
It happened in 1982, in a Usenet post from a guy named Wayne Hamilton in the rec.movies newsgroup.
The movie he was discussing? Star Trek 2. The spoiler? Spock dies at the end.
35 years ago, people were already ruining the ends of movies, books and TV shows for each other. Let’s take a trip through history to excavate the art of the spoiler and how people avoid it.
A Scream In Time
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho became notorious for its twist ending, which revealed that Norman Bates’ murderous mother was actually the cross-dressing Norman himself, trapped in a codependent relationship with her corpse. Hitch knew that this would get people talking, but worried that an audience that went in knowing the plot wouldn’t enjoy it as much.
At the time, theaters were notorious for letting patrons in at pretty much any time during a showing to maximize ticket sales. Hitchcock rebelled against that, mandating that viewers had to watch the film from the beginning. At Psycho‘s New York showings, an audio tape of the director played from the kiosk, saying “Please don’t give away the ending, it’s the only one we have.”
Even before that, Agatha Christie’s 1952 play The Mousetrap – a murder mystery with multiple swerves at its climax – adopted a strange post-performance ritual where the cast respectfully asks the audience not to divulge the ending to anybody outside the theater. This was a social contract, not a legal one, but the intimacy of the experience helped solidify its seriousness.
Prehistoric Spoilers
The Internet didn’t invent spoiling things for fun. One of the earliest modern mentions of the concept is from 1971. National Lampoon #14 saw a one-page article by legendary humorist Doug Kenney entitled “Spoilers” where he breathlessly ruined the twists of dozens of movies and mystery novels, starting with Hitchcock’s Psycho.
It’s not known where Kenney got the idea, and he died in 1980 so we can’t ask him. The thing is, though, although lots of people will cite “Spoilers” as the invention of the term, it was in use as far back as 1920. The June 25th edition of the Honolulu Advertiser from that year prints the letter of a frustrated moviegoer complaining about a “plot-spoiler” at Ye Liberty theater who “insists on telling the story of the picture in advance.”
The phrase “spoil the story” also appears in print in the 20s, so the question is when it evolved into the single word “spoiler.” That’s one that, given the chaotic and hard-to-map growth of the English language, we might not be able to answer.
Kenney’s article seems to have pushed the term back into public consciousness. National Lampoon was an incredible cultural phenomenon at the time, and the word spread like wildfire. Shortly thereafter, science fiction writer Spider Robinson started penning reviews of current books and short stories for Destinies magazine. When it came time to discuss plot twists, Spider would preface them with a “spoiler warning.”
One of the most famous early spoilers came on an episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1977. Carson’s guest was actor Peter Strauss, on to promote his ABC miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man Book II, which was currently airing. Speculation on the final fate of Strauss’s character Rudy Jordache was all over the water coolers, but the audience erupted in boos when the actor, discussing the finale, said “At the same time, it is a gruesome decision. It was a decision that will probably upset people.” He tried to walk it back, but the genie was out of the bottle.
Luke, I Am Your Spoiler
You can’t have a spoiler without a twist, and the revelation of Luke Skywalker’s parentage at the end of Return of the Jedi is one of the most famous cinematic twists of all time. George Lucas took extreme measures to keep Vader’s secret from getting out prior to the film’s release, but in 1978 actor David Prowse – the man inside the suit – spoiled it to an audience of a thousand people in Berkeley.
“Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are hooked up in a do-or-die lightsaber duel when Luke learned that Darth is, in fact, his long-lost father.”
Bizarrely enough, this was an accidental spoiler. Prowse didn’t even know at the time that Vader was Luke’s father, and when they filmed the scene, the scripted dialogue was “Obi-Wan killed your father.” James Earl Jones dubbed in “No, I am your father,” in post-production. The actor just made a lucky guess that turned out to be right.
That wasn’t the only accidental spoiler the Star Wars franchise has seen. The release of The Phantom Menace was highly anticipated, and the scant plot hints that leaked just whet the appetites of long-time fans. Unfortunately, Lucasfilm ended up blowing one of the movie’s most important beats before the premiere.
Movie soundtracks often hit stores before the flick opens, and The Phantom Menace was no exception. Unfortunately, the track listing of soaring John Williams compositions included one called “Qui-Gon’s Noble End.” There really isn’t any way of reading that beyond “Liam Neeson’s character dies,” right? Especially because the next track is “The High Council Meeting and Qui-Gon’s Funeral.”
Log On, Get Spoiled
By 1995, the phrase was in common enough parlance on the Web that it was being used in textbooks – that year’s Navigating The Internet With Os/2 Warp includes a definition of the term.
In the early newsgroup days, when the Internet was plain text on a white background, there wasn’t much you could do to hide spoilers. Some posters started using the ROT13 cipher to encode their text – it’s easy enough to decode but hard to do so accidentally, and that became the standard for quite some time.
Once the Web moved beyond the plaintext era, spoilers became a serious problem on websites. Coders tried making it easier for people to hide spoilers through special formatting that obscures the text, making it the same color as the page’s background and requiring readers to click or highlight to reveal them.
The Twist That Doesn’t Miss
Spoiler culture broke its way into the mainstream in an unexpected place – not with a sci-fi movie or a comic book, but an artsy thriller set in Northern Ireland. Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game is the story of a young IRA volunteer who befriends and falls in love with the girlfriend of a political prisoner. The twist midway through is that the girlfriend is a transgender woman, played by androgynous-looking actor Jaye Davidson. Critics were asked not to reveal that in their reviews, and it seems to have worked.
The media has long wrestled with spoiler etiquette. One of the most widely cited policies came from New York Magazine’s “Vulture” imprint in 2008. The site’s bailiwick is media and popular culture, and to discuss that with a critical eye often involves laying some plot details out to dry.
Then-editor Dan Kois penned the “Official Vulture Statues of Limitations,” which laid out the site’s policies for both article content and headlines. Reality TV could be spoiled in detail as soon as the episode aired on the East Coast. Movies, the monday after the film opened. Books, three months.
It was a noble effort to codify an approach towards revealing plot elements, but one that wasn’t really held to on the rest of the Internet. Different sites have their own ethical standards, with some gleefully building reputations on being the first to reveal a movie’s ending or post-credits Easter Egg.
Spoiler Warfare
As people’s sensitivity towards spoilers began to grow, trolls started weaponizing them. One of the most notorious incidents in fandom history happened on July 25th, 2005, with the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth volume in J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular fantasy series.
Near the end of the book, teacher Severus Snape finally embraces his villainous instincts and kills the beloved Albus Dumbledore. This was a deeply shocking moment, but unfortunately for hundreds of thousands of Potter fans, they’d already had it spoiled.
You see, a few copies of the book had leaked before the release date, and one enterprising spoiler scanned the page where Snape kills Dumbledore and put it on the Internet. That image started to spread like wildfire. Social blogging service Livejournal was the worst hit, with its hundreds of Harry Potter communities being deluged with the spoiler, often hidden in misleading links.
The antics even spread to the real world – a video of a troll yelling “Snape kills Dumbledore” to a crowd of people waiting outside Barnes & Noble for the book’s midnight release went viral shortly after. The Jonesboro, Arkansas library even spoofed it a few years later by putting the spoiler up on billboards.
Some media companies even tried to leverage spoilers against their competitors. For some time, WCW’s Monday Nitro aired live while the WWF’s Raw (which aired in the same time slot) was often pre-taped. The two shows battled for the wrestling viewing audience and used every dirty trick in the book to get it. On January 4, 1999, Nitro announcer Tony Schiavone broke an unwritten rule and told his viewers the result of a title match that was going to happen that same night on the WWF’s show.
“Fans, as Hollywood Hogan walks away and you look at this 40,000 plus on hand, if you’re even thinking about changing the channel to our competition, fans, do not, because we understand that Mick Foley, who wrestled here one time as Cactus Jack, is going to win their world title. Ha! That’s gonna put some butts in the seats, heh.”
The plan backfired horribly. Foley, who had been enjoying a rapid rise to prominence despite his unconventional appearance, was beloved by fans of both companies. Within minutes according to Nielsen ratings, 600,000 people switched over to the WWF’s show. Wrestling historians mark this date as the beginning of the end for WCW.
The Counterattack
As spoilers became a “thing” on the Internet, content creators started looking for ways to lock their material down. More and more restrictive non-disclosure agreements started becoming common in the industry, and that just incetivized the press to dig harder to get scoops.
The groundbreaking reality TV series Survivor was one of the shows that had to contend with a very active spoiler culture. Message board denizens obsessively picked through interviews and promotional material to ferret out inside information, and producer Mark Burnett knew it. He retaliated by creating red herrings and fake spoilers, hiding them in website code and B-roll to lead viewers down the primrose path.
Other shows film tons of extraneous footage to keep secrets. The Walking Dead‘s season 6 cliffhanger left the identity of the cast member killed by Negan up in the air, and to muddy the waters the crew shot every single actor having their heads smashed in so the real identity wouldn’t leak.
The video game industry has become more spoiler-averse in recent years with the rise of streaming. Plot-heavy games like RPGs are especially vulnerable, as they typically value story over gameplay, and if you watch it for free you might not need to pay $70 to grind through it.
When Atlus released the long-awaited Persona 5 in the United States, they disabled the ability to stream through the PlayStation 4’s native UI. In addition, the company warned players that if they broadcast content after a certain point in the game they could be punished with copyright strikes or account suspensions.
There’s even an app on the market designed to filter unwanted information from your social network fields. Spoiler Shield acts as a wrapper around Twitter and Facebook, blocking off posts that contain keywords that you set, from sports teams to Game of Thrones. You can double tap to reveal it or just scroll on by unsullied.
The Science Of Spoilers
The way humans consume media is far more asynchronous than ever before. Streaming media, pre-release leaks, and social media can expose us to spoilers at any time, whether wanted or not. Just the very existence of Wikipedia (which banned spoiler warnings in 2007) means that the ending of every piece of fiction is at your fingertips.
Oddly enough, it’s looking like spoilers might not actually “spoil” your enjoyment after all. A 2011 study at the University of San Diego gave three groups of readers a selection of short stories. One got stories where a spoiler was given to them right at the beginning. Another group got them rewritten to include a spoiler for the ending in the text itself. And a third just got the basic stories with no added spoilers.
The scientists measured the “hedonic rating” that each reader assigned to the stories, and they discovered that there was little to no difference between those who had the endings ruined in advance and those who didn’t. In fact, for most of the stories the people who had spoilers actually enjoyed them more.
Why is anybody’s guess. Some speculate that the human brain doesn’t actually like to be surprised – it calls into question our ability to predict a rational outcome, which is the evolutionary advantage that has enabled us to survive so long.
Spoilers For The Future
The genie is pretty much out of the bottle when it comes to spoilers. In a WikiLeaks world, you can’t keep a secret for very long. But it could be argued that spoiler culture actually pushes creators to make work that’s not dependent on the last-minute plot twist. If your media experience can be devalued by reading about it beforehand, maybe it wasn’t that great to begin with?