Psst...Can You Keep a Monster Secret?

If you know what the Cloverfield monster is, don't tell Dennis Acevedo.

Where the upcoming, under-wraps JJ Abrams production is concerned, the Kentucky man wants to make like it's going on 1958 not 2008.

"I hopefully can make to the end [opening day], and be surprised," Acevedo says of the movie due out next month.

He is not alone.

Even as some fanboys pour over Cloverfield trailers as if they were the Zapruder film, there are others who only want to know so much.

"I think the person who's very involved in this type of movie is deeply split," says UGO.com movies editor Jordan Hoffman, "because they know the movie will be that much better if they wait."

The wait began in earnest back in July when the first Cloverfield trailer debuted before screenings of Transformers. The clip was such a tease there wasn't even a title, only a release date. For a while Cloverfield was known simply as 1-18-08.

On the off chance you saw the shot of the Statue of Liberty's severed head and decided the film was a romantic comedy, Abrams, the genre icon behind Lost and Alias, confirmed it was a monster movie. But he didn't say, and he hasn't said, what kind of monster.

Five months later—an eternity in the blog age—the secret still isn't definitively out.

Says Acevedo: "It's incredible."

Even members of the Ain't It Cool News community, regular employers of the spoiler alert, have shown restraint.

"i don't know how much i want to give away b/c i think people are having a really good time hypothesizing about what the monster is," one reputed tipster wrote.

Hoffman credits filmmakers for keeping fans busy—with viral sites, such as the one for the bogus Japanese corporation, Tagruato, with MySpace pages for the movie's characters and more.

"Part of the reason they've been able to keep it a secret this long has been leaking other little things about the project," Hoffman says.

Certainly, there's been enough intrigue to keep Acevedo hooked. No caveman he, the 36-year-old computer programmer runs a blog called Cloverfield Clues.

Just because Acevedo doesn't want the surprise spoiled—he declared his site a spoiler-free zone this week—doesn't mean he wants a news blackout. Or a moratorium on monster speculation. When he emailed a reporter a screen shot from the latest Cloverfield trailer, he couldn't resist asking of the upright something or other, "What do you think it looks like?"

Acevedo has his own theories. Mostly of what it's not.

"It's not Cthulhu [the giant, tentacle-faced H.P. Lovecraft creature]," Acevedo says. "It's not anything we've seen before. It's not Godzilla."

Acevedo cites as evidence a recent interview with Bryan Burk, another Cloverfield producer, who told Sci Fi Wire that, while Abrams was inspired by Japan's King of the Monsters, the new movie is "an entirely original story and monster."

But maybe not entirely unique. Acevedo guesses that, like Godzilla, Cloverfield's mountain of trouble emerges from the sea.

Which is not the same as saying it is a sea creature.

"You can't have a fish monster, like a giant scrod or something," Hoffman says. "That would be absurd."

All will be revealed in the former 1-18-08 on Jan. 18.

Unless the secret leaks before then. Which both Acevedo and Hoffman fully expect.

"I think we're past the point where we can make it to the end, and somebody's not going to spoil it," Acevedo says.

Hoffman says there's "no chance at all" opening day will arrive without the monster's identity previously being revealed.

"It'll simply have to leak at some point," Hoffman says. "It's going to have to leak. And I think at some point they want it to leak."

Either way, it won't matter to Hoffman. He'll still be up for the ride. That's because, if nothing else, Cloverfield will come complete with the teaser trailer for Abrams' new Star Trek movie.

"That's my $10 right there," Hoffman says.

His secret's out.