There will be spoilers in what follows.
For years, the hosts of the long-running geek culture podcast The Filmcast have been promoting what they call an “unsullied” media diet. Named in reference to a legion of eunuch soldiers in Game of Thrones, the unsullied filmgoer fastidiously avoids trailers, doesn’t read reviews, and ideally remains fully ignorant of the cast, genre, and basic plot of a movie before entering the theater. On The Filmcast, the hosts will frequently offer cryptic, vacuous reviews of new releases, enjoining their unsullied listeners to make a trip to the multiplex while providing only vague assurances of a film’s merit. Beyond the audience of this particular podcast, a certain ilk of very online cinephile is increasingly committed to avoiding trailers in the hopes of remaining unspoiled of not only major plot points, but even the very premise of a movie. While the “unsullied” describe their position as a timely, principled defense of film as cinema slips into obsolescence, behind the walls built to protect cinephiles from the pain of a plot laid bare sits a profound anxiety about informational privacy and control.
As the definition of a spoiler has expanded from a “ruined” plot twist to prior knowledge of plot details in general, we find ourselves in a time of “spoiler creep.” For recent U.S. films, spoiler creep is readily apparent in the marketing and reviews for new releases. In 2026 alone, movies including The Drama, Disclosure Day, The Invite, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day have intentionally obscured basic plot information in trailers and ancillary marketing. Critics have largely followed suit by not revealing that the films respectively hinge on (spoiler alert): a school shooting, aliens, extramarital sex, and a telepathic antagonist taken from the X-Men comics. While online discussion of spoilers tends to center on the spectator’s pleasurable experience of surprise and discovery, I want to suggest that spoiler creep is better understood in terms of a desire for control in an era of what Mark Andrejevic aptly calls “infoglut.” As life online increasingly means subjection to an incessant, overwhelming barrage of information, many viewers have turned to an unsullied media diet as a means of wresting back their agency.
Contemporary spoiler culture is, itself, a product of the internet. Although scholars such as Milan Terlunen and Clayton Tarr have pointed to earlier precedents in popular book reviews, spoiler alerts emerged from Usenet groups in the 1980s and eventually became standard practice for online film reviews around the turn of the millennium. Roger Ebert’s oft-quoted 2005 essay “Critics Have No Right to Play Spoiler” articulates a representative aesthetic justification of the spoiler alert. Writing in response to the conservative backlash against the depiction of euthanasia in the final act of Million Dollar Baby, Ebert argues that—regardless of one’s political beliefs—audiences should be allowed the pleasure of discovery as they experience a plot unfold onscreen. He writes that the audience has the right to disagree with the choices a character makes, but crucially also has the right to be surprised by these choices while watching a film. Writing in the early years of contemporary spoiler culture, Ebert posits that audience enjoyment hinges on the real-time discovery of narrative developments regardless of their political implications. The spoiler is then best understood as a theory of spectatorship where the personal experience of informational access is essential to cinematic pleasure.
Spoiler-averse cinephiles have largely adopted precisely this vision of spectatorship, where discovery is vital for enjoying a movie. The logic of spoiler creep is consonant with, if not fully explained by, this approach to filmgoing. If the feeling of surprise at a last-act plot twist is gratifying, why not chase the high of discovery and remain in suspense about a film’s premise, cast, or genre? If spoiler creep refers to a growing demand by audiences to remain unsullied before entering the theater, then Hollywood has predictably begun offering a product to meet this demand with movies intentionally designed for misdirection. While the work of obscuring spoilers is most apparent in paratextual marketing and criticism, the rationale of spoiler creep extends into design of the film itself. Among contemporary filmmakers, the horror director Zach Cregger has emerged as something of an auteur of spoiler creep cinema.
Zach Cregger’s authorial brand is primarily defined by convoluted narratives in which the movie’s conceit is only revealed about halfway through its runtime, meaning the premise is structurally positioned as information not to be spoiled. Along with Jordan Peele and Curry Barker, Cregger is part of a wave of sketch comedians-turned-horror directors, having gotten his start as a member of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know. Since moving beyond early comedic pursuits, Cregger is known today for directing and/or producing the horror films Barbarian (2022), Companion (2025), Weapons (2025), and his 2026 entry in the Resident Evil franchise. His films consistently employ dark humor and shocking violence in allegorical investigations of digital culture. But Cregger’s films are less notable for their content than for their formal organization, where information is judiciously meted out according to the logic of spoiler creep. His films are marked by unpredictability and misdirection in the service of concealing their basic premises. And while Cregger’s filmography is emblematic of a contemporary “unsullied” media culture, his signature approach has historical roots in earlier eras of filmmaking.
The conspiracy film of the 1970s is an instructive starting point for considering the questions of informational revelations in U.S. cinema. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Fredric Jameson convincingly describes the narrative disorientation of the 1970s conspiracy thriller as symptomatic of the individual’s asymmetric access to information in late capitalism. In films like Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, and The Conversation, our ineffectual protagonists find themselves mired in dangerous plots orchestrated by obscure forces that are neither defeated nor fully understood. These movies present narratives without resolution that are fundamentally defined by epistemic uncertainty. Jameson importantly notes that these films tend to highlight new informational and media technologies in moments of transformation, including telephone networks, television, and myriad surveillance devices. For him, the 1970s conspiracy film reflects a nascent awareness of the individual’s growing enmeshment in unthinkably vast networks of information and finance, just as computational technologies were beginning to reshape the global economy.
The meandering narrative opacity of the late twentieth century conspiracy thriller is effectively inverted in a cycle of turn-of-the-millennium puzzle films. Movies such as The Game, Memento, and The Matrix depict individuals navigating conspiracies that invite the audience to decode scraps of narrative information alongside the characters onscreen. Unlike the conspiracy thriller’s murky lack of resolution, the puzzle film rewards viewers with clear explanations and narrative closure after sending them spiraling through complex plot convolutions. By the end of these films, the clues come together, and our heroes come to a full understanding of the rules of the game. Critics, including Thomas Elsaesser and Alexander Galloway, have diagnosed this cycle of films as indicative of new relationship between users and digital media in the early years of the Internet. Where informational technologies of the 1970s were depicted as oppressive and inaccessible, the cyberspace fantasies of the 1990s positioned networked computers as empowering tools of informational access. As Galloway writes, the meaning of the puzzle film is the “fetishization of the ‘knowledge triumph’,” where both the protagonist and the viewer go on a journey culminating in the epistemological certainty promised by technology of the digital age. Narratively, the puzzle film frequently relied on last-minute reveals and reversals, meaning spoilers were generally safeguarded by their placement at the very end of the movie, as in The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, and The Sixth Sense.
As a successor to the conspiracy thriller and the puzzle film, today’s spoiler creep cinema represents a new cultural orientation towards computational technologies and informational access. The films of Zach Cregger demonstrate a retreat from the dream of omniscient clarity evident in the puzzle film. Rather, his films index information’s transformation from empowering to overwhelming, as audiences seek to manage “infoglut” in the era of platform capitalism. There will be spoilers in what follows.
Written and directed by Cregger, Barbarian seems to present a simple premise. A woman (played by Georgina Campbell) checks into a Detroit Airbnb that is already occupied by a shifty man portrayed by Bill Skarsgård, fresh off his performance as the murderous clown Pennywise in the It film series. While the film’s ominous trailer vaguely hints at some hidden danger lurking in the rental home, the first act of the movie takes place over a single evening as Campbell tries to suss out Skarsgård’s intentions. Midway through the film, Skarsgård disappears into the basement of the house, and Cregger reveals that the creepy-Airbnb-guy premise was a feint. The second half of the film takes us into the home’s nightmarish subbasement that is inhabited by the monstrous progeny of a barbarous man who seems to have been abducting and imprisoning women for decades.
Barbarian clumsily grapples with a number of big themes including urban blight in the wake of deindustrialization, the impersonal avarice of big tech platforms, and the overdue social reckoning of the #MeToo movement. The fact that none of these ideas fully cohere is largely obscured by the movie’s structural trickery. Barbarian’s most striking moment occurs approximately forty minutes into the film, in a sequence that exemplifies Cregger’s approach. Lost in the hellish tunnels beneath the Airbnb, the protagonist witnesses the brutal murder of Skarsgård’s character at the hands of a monstrous, nude woman. Illuminated only by the weak beam of a flashlight, Cregger’s handheld camera jostles to frame the woman’s grotesque face as she inexplicably screams at Campbell’s final girl. The screen cuts to black, and after a few seconds of silence, Donavan’s whimsical folk pop tune “Riki Tiki Tavi” begins to play as the film introduces an as-yet-unseen Justin Long singing along, driving a red convertible along the California coast. A technique he will revive in his subsequent film, Weapons, Cregger abruptly cuts away from a scene of extreme violence with a disjunctive reveal of a new character in an incongruous milieu. In this cut, the director ostentatiously discloses the pointed misdirection of Barbarian’s opening act. This is an engineered moment of surprise, in which the spectator is meant to find pleasure in the experience of discovery just as Ebert suggests. According to the terms of spoiler creep, to subsequently reveal that Barbarian has a decoy premise would be to spoil the movie.
In the case of Companion, I’m less interested in Cregger’s artistic vision than in how his imprimatur is used to establish audience expectations. Like Barbarian, Companion intentionally concealed its conceit with enigmatic marketing, delaying the crucial reveal that the protagonist is an android until midway through the film. Although Cregger had initially planned on directing Companion, he ultimately stepped aside to let screenwriter Drew Hancock direct his script. However, Cregger remained attached as a producer and the film was heavily promoted as being produced by the team behind Barbarian. Set in the near future, the thriller depicts a couple’s ill-fated lake house vacation devolving into bloody violence as the lead character Iris learns that she is a robot companion being unwittingly controlled by her incel boyfriend. The movie wends its way through a few more twists (a murder plot, revelations involving an additional android character) before reaching its inevitable conclusion of Iris’s liberation. In its narrative and themes, Companion noticeably repeats the beats of recent films such as Her or Ex Machina, in which feminized AI beings break free of the constraints put upon them by needy men. Despite this similarity, the appeal of the film is not its now-familiar critique of the objectification of women through the overdetermined figure of the female robot, but the organization of its narrative information. The early, obvious hints at the protagonist’s sex robot identity serve to whet the appetite of an audience anticipating the crucial moment of informational disclosure.
Weapons is comparatively candid about its premise. Consistent with the evidence displayed by its trailer and poster, the film is, in fact, about the mysterious disappearance of a classroom of children in a small American town. That said, the film’s villain—a witch called Aunt Gladys portrayed in an Oscar-winning performance by Amy Madigan—is predictably obscured in the film’s marketing. Just as in Barbarian and Companion, Cregger structures the film in line with spoiler creep’s logic of concealment and disclosure: repeated glimpses of a signature red wig and clownish makeup ultimately culminate in the mid-film reveal of Aunt Gladys and her witchy schemes. True to form, Cregger recycles the abrupt cuts to black – memorably employed in Barbarian – throughout Weapons. Several times, the director follows shocking glimpses of Aunt Gladys with sudden shifts to a new character’s point-of-view, slowly meting out morsels of narrative information along the way. Unlike the final reveal of the puzzle film, Weapons continuously redirects the plot to create numerous moments of discovery.
Cregger’s latest film, Resident Evil (2026), is something of an outlier in concept if not execution. Working with well-known intellectual property, Cregger is unable to conceal the monster movie premise. In lieu of narrative complexity, the film is a series of level-like set pieces, where the audience discovers gruesome monstrosities notably absent from the marketing. As an homage to the long-running video game series, the film is more interested in evoking the experience of play than in creating a complex narrative. The movie follows a down-on-his-luck courier tasked with delivering vital medicine to a nearby hospital amidst an unfolding outbreak of zombie-like monsters. The simple plot tracks his journey forward to an inevitable climax at the hospital, with jarring moments of violence and gamer easter eggs being the only elements that could possibly be spoiled.
At one level, we can read Cregger’s films as allegories of life under platform capitalism. Barbarian works through the ambient menace that accompanies an individual user’s interactions with opaque tech platforms. Companion evokes the unending Turing Test that is contemporary life online, where we witness A.I. bots’ incremental conquest of the internet. Weapons obliquely portrays the violent groupthink incubated on social media platforms in a time of rising fascism. And Resident Evil depicts the horror of precarity in the gig economy. Yet even as his thematic interests have developed, Cregger’s directorial style is still defined most clearly by his deliberately concealed premises and scattered delivery of narrative information that is indicative of spoiler creep as a response to our era of infoglut.
Treating everything as a potential spoiler necessitates a strict media diet to maximize the pleasurable control of informational access. Set apart from the everyday noise of alerts, updates, and news feeds, the cinema becomes a privileged site of individual sovereignty over data. Narrative information is necessarily delimited by the contours of the plot, and the spectator’s discreet, intentional choice to purchase a ticket presents them with power over the time and means of access in which the information is revealed. The structural concealment that is the hallmark of Cregger’s filmography encourages this relationship to movies—they are best enjoyed if you go in knowing as little as possible. For the unsullied cinephile, filmgoing becomes a ritualized fantasy of total informational control.
Harry Burson teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he writes about film, sound, and immersive media. He prefers to see movies at large, impersonal multiplexes.
Article photo by Clement Lindley Wragge (b.1852, d.1922), dated 14 March 1905 from Auckland War Memorial Museum via Flickr