Man, am I glad I knew nothing about A Perfect Getaway going in. There are two things Hollywood can’t resist in making a trailer: showing the best jokes in a comedy and revealing the secrets of thrillers. Oops, did I say “thriller”? If you see ads on TV, I suppose you already knew that . . .
-Roger Ebert

The last 20 minutes of the new thriller, A Perfect Getaway, contain a clever and well-plotted twist that could have elevated a surprisingly entertaining summer fluff-flick to a whole different level of artistic achievement if the movie’s trailer hadn’t telegraphed its secrets from 50 yards away. Indeed, advertising that there is a twist puts an audience on the lookout for clues.

The question becomes: In today’s lightning fast-Internet culture, in which a film’s secrets can be spilled online the day it is released, can an audience still be shocked?

In the days before Internet buzz became a behemoth industry and trailers didn’t have to work so hard to compete with an overstuffed market, films were freer to surprise an audience. We take it for granted in Psycho that (SPOILER ALERT) Janet Leigh is stabbed to death in the shower in the film’s first reel, but when the film was released in 1960, the murder of the top-billed star in a major Hollywood production halfway through a film’s running time threw audiences for a loop. Hitchcock notoriously instructed theater owners to lock the doors after Psycho had started, barring latecomers from entering lest they miss the lead up to that game-changing moment.

Even films as recent as 1992’s The Crying Game and 1999’s The Sixth Sense were able to create mind-bending twists during the films’ final acts. These days, it seems that only film critics like Ebert whose jobs, by and large, keep them outside the Hollywood hype machine are able to buy into a twist ending. To shock a regular audience, films have to rely on gimmicks that are so outside the realm of possibility that the ending comes as a disappointment.

Case and point: the new horror flick, Orphan, a movie that’s final act is so outlandish that it strips away much of the tension that has come before. After all, where’s the fun in trying to figure out “Esther’s secret,” as the trailer suggests, if it’s essentially impossible to do so?

Maybe there’s no solution to the problem. After all, you can’t stop progress, and the Internet is here to stay. I wish I had an answer.

If I did, wouldn’t that be a great twist?

24 Frames per Second is a bimonthly column written by Will Holston on the craft of film.