Today, few things are as frowned upon as giving away the ending of a film or a novel. Spoilers, or rather the fear of encountering them, seem ubiquitous. By now, spoiler warnings are not confined to online media anymore, but even reviewers in traditional newspapers try not to reveal too much about the plot in their articles. This is quite stunning, since the concept of the spoiler is rather new.

Although the fear of spoilers has permanently changed the way we talk about films and literature, and nowadays hardly any film review is without a spoiler warning, academia has so far hardly discussed the phenomenon. #spoiltheconference, jointly organized by the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies and the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, is the first international conference on spoilers. Since spoilers concern a wide variety of fields, it is decidedly conceived as an interdisciplinary event. We strive for exchange among the disciplines and therefore emphatically invite proposals from literature, film, media, and game studies in general as well as from reception and fan studies and psychology or sociology.