Should trigger warnings contain spoiler warnings?

The other day I was watching the new Netflix movie The Sand Castle, whose dialogue is in Arabic but whose director (Matty Brown) certainly does not seem to be from that part of the world. It's part of a smart trend of directors shooting in other countries, even outside the language they comprehend, to get to make a movie they might not be able to make at home. (Who knows, maybe Matty Brown does speak Arabic.)

I noticed the usual trigger warnings we get at the starts of films these days, and one of those for The Sand Castle was "injury detail."

I should say "Spoiler alert! One of those was 'injury detail.'"

Now, you can't ordinarily glean much from these trigger warnings. Just knowing that a movie contains "violence, crude language, sexual situations, etc." is not enough to really tell you what's ahead. Though I suppose if you think a movie is one kind of movie, and the fact that it contains violence means it's another kind of movie, that too could be construed as a spoiler.

Injury detail, though, is a little different. It means a character in this movie is going to lose an arm or a leg, or at the very least get a very bloody wound. It turned out to be the latter in this case.

And though I can't say that actually felt like a true spoiler, it did put me on the lookout for a gruesome injury occurring in the story, which was not necessarily going to be the case just from knowing that the family in question is stranded on a deserted island with only a lighthouse to shelter them. 

It made me wonder: Should we get spoiler warnings for the trigger warnings? Or even be able to opt out of them altogether?

I think of myself as a person who does not get triggered by much. If you tell me that I'm going to see something in a movie I've never seen before, I will rush to it all the more quickly. In fact, this was one of the reasons The Coffee Table, which felt out of sync with all the other films in my top ten in terms of size and scope, was my #5 movie of 2024. It's a stance that benefits me as a critic, meaning I can watch truly anything that someone is happy to make, only turning my nose up at it in advance if I think it is going to be lame or tired.

So for me, the trigger warning does nothing, except possibly spoil what's to come.

I'd like an option on Netflix where I could choose "turn off trigger warnings." To be sure that this option does not already exist, I just googled it, and it does not.

If someone is going to lose an arm or a leg, or just get a very bloody wound, I'd really like to be surprised by that detail, not just wait to see in what form it's going to transpire.