Horror movies and franchises
Six of these thirteen are marked easy and four hard, which makes this the most lopsided round on the page. Read each question twice, allow twenty seconds, and take answers in writing, because the Dollars Trilogy in release order and the two elves in The Year Without a Santa Claus need complete answers rather than one lucky word.
The Nosferatu question is worth stopping on. Prana Film made it in 1922 and never made anything else: Bram Stoker's widow sued over the unlicensed use of Dracula, the studio went bankrupt, and a court later ordered the copies destroyed. Prints survived, which is the only reason the film can still be watched. Max Schreck was a working German actor; the story that he was a real vampire is fiction, and the version everyone repeats comes from Shadow of the Vampire, a film released in 2000.
Q1.Who is the masked killer at the center of the Halloween film series?Tap to reveal
Answer: Michael Myers
The blank white face in the 1978 original was a cheap Captain Kirk mask from Star Trek, bought for a few dollars and painted over by the crew.
Q2.Which 1984 Wes Craven film introduced the burned killer Freddy Krueger?Tap to reveal
Answer: A Nightmare on Elm Street
The film gave Johnny Depp his first screen role, cast partly because Craven's teenage daughter liked him at the audition.
Q3.Jason Voorhees is the recurring killer of which slasher franchise?Tap to reveal
Answer: Friday the 13th
Jason is not the killer in the 1980 original at all - the murders there are committed by his mother, Pamela Voorhees.
Q4.What is the first name of the possessed girl in The Exorcist (1973)?Tap to reveal
Answer: Regan
The film became the first horror picture ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and it won two Academy Awards.
Q5.Which 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film is set around the Bates Motel?Tap to reveal
Answer: Psycho
Hitchcock shot it in black and white using his television crew to keep costs down, and the blood in the shower scene was chocolate syrup.
Q6.Which John Carpenter film was written under the working title The Babysitter Murders?Tap to reveal
Answer: Halloween
Producer Irwin Yablans suggested moving the story to Halloween night, and the new title arrived with the new setting.
Q7.The 1922 silent film Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of which novel?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dracula
Bram Stoker's widow won a copyright suit and a court ordered the prints destroyed, so the film survives only because a few copies had already escaped abroad.
Q8.What is the name of the hotel where Jack Torrance takes a winter caretaking job in The Shining?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Overlook Hotel
Stephen King disliked Kubrick's version enough to back a separate television adaptation of his novel years later.
Q9.Which 1968 George Romero film established the modern flesh-eating undead?Tap to reveal
Answer: Night of the Living Dead
The word zombie is never spoken in it - the creatures are called ghouls - and a missing copyright notice on the release prints dropped the film into the public domain.
Q10.What is the name of the killer doll in the Child's Play films?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chucky
The doll is inhabited by the soul of a dying strangler, Charles Lee Ray, and Brad Dourif has supplied the voice across decades of sequels.
Q11.Which 1974 Tobe Hooper film introduced the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Marketed as a true story, it was only loosely inspired by the crimes of Ed Gein, who also fed the characters in Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs.
Q12.What nickname is given to the masked killer of the Scream franchise?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ghostface
The mask was not designed for the film - it was an existing mass-market Halloween mask the crew found while scouting a house.
Q13.Which horror franchise centers on a puzzle box that summons the Cenobites?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hellraiser
Clive Barker adapted his own novella The Hellbound Heart, in which the lead Cenobite is never once called Pinhead.
Costume history and pop culture
Eight of these thirteen are marked medium, which makes this the round for the middle of the evening: it separates teams without demoralising anyone.
One question needs a ruling before you read it out. The answer sheet gives Aladdin as the first animated film with a celebrity voice actor, and that is the answer it wants, but the claim does not hold: Walt Disney deliberately cast well-known performers on The Jungle Book in 1967 — Phil Harris, Louis Prima, George Sanders, Sebastian Cabot — and Harris's casting expanded Baloo from an episodic part into a lead. Robin Williams changed what a celebrity voice was worth in 1992; he was not the first. Say before the round whether Aladdin alone scores.
The Scream answer is two names, Billy Loomis and Stu Macher, and most people offer one. Say that both are required before you read it.
Q1.What ordinary household item makes the simplest classic ghost costume?Tap to reveal
Answer: A white bed sheet
The look descends from the winding sheet, the plain cloth in which bodies were wrapped for burial before coffins were common.
Q2.The standard witch costume is topped by a hat of what shape?Tap to reveal
Answer: A tall pointed cone
The shape was not standard witch dress in the witch-trial era - it hardened into the stereotype through nineteenth-century book illustrations and later stage and film design.
Q3.Which actor's 1931 Universal costume — white tie, high-collared cape, slicked-back hair — fixed the standard vampire look?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bela Lugosi
The high collar was a stage device from Hamilton Deane's 1924 play, built to hide the actor as he dropped through a trapdoor, and it reached the screen because the same performer had already played the part on Broadway.
Q4.What Scottish and Irish word describes going door to door in disguise for food or coins?Tap to reveal
Answer: Guising
Guisers were expected to earn the treat with a song, poem, or trick, which is why the North American phrase later kept the word trick in it.
Q5.What two pieces made up the classic mid-century boxed Halloween costume sold by firms like Ben Cooper and Collegeville?Tap to reveal
Answer: A plastic mask and a printed smock
The smock carried a picture of the character across the chest, so a child wore the hero's face and a portrait of the hero at the same time.
Q6.Before molded plastic and rubber, mass-produced Halloween masks were commonly made from what stiffened paper material?Tap to reveal
Answer: Papier-mache
Many were imported from Germany, and the two world wars cut that supply off and pushed production to American manufacturers.
Q7.The grinning white mask worn by V in V for Vendetta, now a costume-shop staple, depicts which historical conspirator?Tap to reveal
Answer: Guy Fawkes
Britain has burned effigies of him every 5 November since the 1600s, and the stylised face costume shops copy is illustrator David Lloyd's comic-book design rather than any surviving likeness.
Q8.Which 1939 film fixed the image of a green-skinned witch in popular costume?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Wizard of Oz
Baum's novel never describes the Wicked Witch as green - the color was a Technicolor choice, and the copper-based makeup left stains on the actress's skin.
Q9.What is the name of the elegant skeleton figure in a wide feathered hat, worn as a costume around Day of the Dead?Tap to reveal
Answer: La Catrina
She began as a printmaker's satire of poor Mexicans who dressed to pass as European, and was named and popularized later by muralist Diego Rivera.
Q10.Which Star Wars villain's black helmet and cape have sold as a costume every year since 1977?Tap to reveal
Answer: Darth Vader
The costume and the voice belonged to two different men - David Prowse wore the suit, James Earl Jones dubbed the lines.
Q11.Which Universal makeup artist created the flat head and neck bolts of the Frankenstein monster costume?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jack Pierce
The bolts are electrodes, not screws, and none of it comes from Mary Shelley's novel - the look is a studio design the studio still protects.
Q12.A black-and-white striped suit and wild green hair make up which 1988 Tim Burton character's costume?Tap to reveal
Answer: Beetlejuice
The film spells the character's name Betelgeuse, after the red giant star in Orion, and only the title uses the phonetic version.
Halloween origins and traditions
The questions in this round come from the film pool rather than from folklore; the history sits further down, in the two sourced sections below.
The Room question is phrased forgivingly — about how much money — which is just as well, because the six-million-dollar figure is Tommy Wiseau's own and he has stayed vague about where it came from; the most he has offered is a line to Entertainment Weekly about importing leather jackets from Korea. Accept anything in the right order of magnitude.
If a team offers twenty-three years for Miller's planet without the months and days, take it: the full answer is 23 years, 4 months and 8 days, and holding out for it costs more than the point is worth.
Q1.Which New York City parade is the largest Halloween parade in the United States?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Village Halloween Parade
It began in 1974 as mask maker Ralph Lee's small puppet walk through his own Greenwich Village neighbourhood, and anyone in costume can still join the line.
Q2.What is the carved and lit pumpkin of Halloween called?Tap to reveal
Answer: A jack-o'-lantern
In Ireland and Scotland these lanterns were cut from turnips and beets - pumpkins took over in North America because they are bigger and far easier to hollow out.
Q3.What phrase do children say at the door on Halloween night?Tap to reveal
Answer: Trick or treat
The phrase is a twentieth-century North American coinage, and the custom only became near-universal in the United States after wartime sugar rationing ended.
Q4.On what date is Halloween celebrated?Tap to reveal
Answer: October 31
The name is a contraction of All Hallows' Even, meaning the evening before All Hallows, so the holiday is defined by the feast that follows it.
Q5.Which ancient Gaelic festival marking the end of harvest is considered Halloween's ancestor?Tap to reveal
Answer: Samhain
It is pronounced roughly SOW-in, and it marked the start of the dark half of the year rather than a single night of celebration.
Q6.What Christian feast falls on November 1?Tap to reveal
Answer: All Saints' Day
The November 1 date was settled in Rome during the eighth and ninth centuries, which is what pinned the eve of the feast to October 31.
Q7.What feast day follows on November 2?Tap to reveal
Answer: All Souls' Day
In medieval Britain the poor went souling on that day, asking for small spiced cakes in return for praying for the household's dead.
Q8.What Irish fruit loaf, baked with hidden charms, is eaten at Halloween?Tap to reveal
Answer: Barmbrack
The charms are fortunes - the one who gets the ring is said to marry within the year, while a rag or a pea promised poverty or no marriage at all.
Q9.What Halloween game asks players to catch floating fruit using only their teeth?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bobbing for apples
It began as a courtship divination, with the apple you caught said to identify your future spouse, and it is still called dooking in Scotland.
Q10.Which Minnesota city has called itself the Halloween Capital of the World since the 1920s?Tap to reveal
Answer: Anoka
The town organized its celebration to give young people something to do and cut down on Halloween vandalism, and the parade has run ever since apart from the war years.
Q11.Which Mexican holiday on November 1 and 2 honors the returning dead?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dia de los Muertos
It is a separate tradition from Halloween, listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, and it centers on home altars laid with the food and drink the dead liked in life.
Q12.In Irish folklore, which trickster gave the jack-o'-lantern its name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stingy Jack
The story says he cheated the devil, was then barred from both heaven and hell, and roams the earth with an ember carried in a hollowed turnip.
Q13.What kind of large outdoor fire was central to Samhain and later Halloween customs?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bonfires
The word itself is a compound of bone and fire, recording the animal bones that were burned in the blaze.
Modern Halloween pop culture
Two of these are anecdote questions, and anecdotes are where trivia goes wrong. Spaceman From Pluto was genuinely floated as a title for Back to the Future by the Universal executive Sid Sheinberg, so the answer stands; the famous telling, with the memo and Spielberg's mocking reply, was later dismissed outright by Sheinberg himself.
Mad Max was made cheaply — reported budgets run from two to four hundred thousand Australian dollars — and has taken close to a hundred million worldwide, so the cost-cutting is real. The claim that the extras were paid in beer is repeated everywhere but is hard to trace to any documented production account; give the answer, not the anecdote.
Q1.Which H. G. Wells novel did Orson Welles adapt for the radio broadcast that unsettled American listeners on the night before Halloween in 1938?Tap to reveal
Answer: The War of the Worlds
The scale of the panic is disputed — later research argues newspapers, threatened by radio's pull on advertising, greatly exaggerated how many listeners were actually fooled.
Q2.In which 1966 Peanuts special does Linus wait all night in a pumpkin patch?Tap to reveal
Answer: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
The Great Pumpkin never shows up in any Peanuts special, so Linus misses trick-or-treating every single year.
Q3.Which Michael Jackson song became the Halloween standard through its fourteen-minute short film?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thriller
Horror star Vincent Price recorded the closing spoken verse, and the video later became the first music video added to the Library of Congress film registry.
Q4.Which 1993 stop-motion film follows Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Nightmare Before Christmas
Tim Burton produced and wrote the story but did not direct it - Henry Selick did, and Disney first released it under the Touchstone label.
Q5.Which 1993 Disney comedy about three resurrected Salem witches became an October television staple?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hocus Pocus
Disney released it in July and it underperformed - its status was built entirely by years of annual cable reruns.
Q6.What is the name of The Simpsons' annual Halloween episode?Tap to reveal
Answer: Treehouse of Horror
The segments sit outside the show's continuity, which is why characters can be killed off and turn up unharmed the following week.
Q7.Which three-coloured, kernel-shaped candy is sold by the bagful every American Halloween?Tap to reveal
Answer: Candy corn
Invented in the 1880s, it was marketed year-round under the brand name Chicken Feed, complete with a rooster on the box, back when corn meant livestock fodder rather than a candy flavour.
Q8.Which Netflix series set in Hawkins, Indiana drove a wave of 1980s-styled Halloween costumes?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stranger Things
Its signature monster is named after a demon prince from Dungeons & Dragons, the game the boys are playing in Mike's basement when the first episode opens.
Q9.What is the name of Universal Studios' annual Halloween-season haunted event?Tap to reveal
Answer: Halloween Horror Nights
It launched in Orlando in 1991 as a three-night experiment called Fright Nights and was renamed the following year when it expanded.
Q10.Which 1984 comedy's theme song asks Who you gonna call?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ghostbusters
Huey Lewis sued over the song's resemblance to I Want a New Drug, and the case was settled privately out of court.
Q11.Which 2007 found-footage film about a haunted bedroom launched a run of Halloween-season sequels?Tap to reveal
Answer: Paranormal Activity
Shot for a reported fifteen thousand dollars in the director's own house, it became one of the most profitable films ever made relative to its budget.
Q12.Which 1962 novelty song by Bobby Pickett returns to the charts every October?Tap to reveal
Answer: Monster Mash
Pickett sang it in an impression of Boris Karloff, and the BBC refused to play it at first for being too morbid.
Hosting Halloween trivia
Fifty questions is more than one sitting for most groups. Read each question twice, allow twenty seconds, and a round of a dozen takes ten minutes, plus three or four to mark. The full page runs an hour to seventy-five minutes with a break. To shorten it, cut whole rounds rather than thinning each one: thinning flattens the difficulty curve and the evening stops building.
Teams of three to five work best. Below three the specialist questions feel unfair; above six, half the table stops contributing. One point per question, no half points, nothing for spelling, and teams swap sheets so nobody marks their own. Read the answers aloud after each round rather than at the end — the context is half the entertainment, and disputes settled one round at a time do not compound.
With a wide age range, pitch the difficulty at the youngest person rather than the average. An adult who gets an easy question right stays in the game; a child who scores nothing stops playing within two rounds. Keep the hard questions as tiebreakers among the adults, and for a mostly-child group use the dedicated kids' page in the related list.
The sheet prints either way, questions only or with the answer key, so the answers can stay at the front of the room.
Where Halloween actually comes from
Halloween is All Hallows' Eve, the night before All Saints' Day, and the name is the least disputed part of the story. The Frankish Empire adopted 1 November as the date of All Saints' Day in 835; the change has been attributed to Alcuin of Northumbria and to the Irish clerics at the Frankish court, and one reason offered for it is entirely practical, that Rome in summer could not accommodate the pilgrims.
Samhain is real and genuinely old. It appears in the earliest Irish literature, from the ninth century, and the tenth-century manuscript Tochmarc Emire lists it among the four seasonal festivals. What is disputed is how much of modern Halloween descends from it. Ronald Hutton has argued that the medieval records give no evidence that 1 November was a major pan-Celtic festival, and that the surviving tales describe no religious observances at all. James Frazer's reading of Samhain as a festival of the dead, where most popular accounts still begin, came with his own admission that the evidence was inconclusive.
The lanterns have a similar problem. Hollowed turnips and mangelwurzels carved with faces are well documented in nineteenth-century England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and guising with turnip lanterns is recorded in Scotland in 1895. The antiquity is not. The phrase jack-o'-lantern is older than the carving custom and meant something else: the Oxford English Dictionary records it from 1658 for the will-o'-the-wisp. It is applied to a carved pumpkin in American English from 1837, and a Kingston, Ontario newspaper of 1 November 1866 describes hollowed pumpkin heads lit by candle.
Trick-or-treating is younger than almost anyone guesses. Souling — poor people and children going door to door during Allhallowtide for soul cakes in return for prayers for the dead — is documented from at least the fifteenth century in England, Wales, Flanders, Bavaria and Austria. The earliest known appearance of the phrase in print is Canadian, as tricks or treats, in The Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, on 1 November 1917; the first American appearance is 1928, in the Bay City Daily Times. The practice does not become widespread in the United States until the 1930s, and stalls under sugar rationing between April 1942 and June 1947.
Three Halloween claims that keep being repeated
The poisoned sweet is the one worth killing outright, because it changes how people behave. Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, went through newspaper reports from 1958 to 1983 looking for Halloween candy tampering: fewer than ninety incidents qualified as tampering at all, and he attributed none of them to random attempts to harm children. Five child deaths were initially treated by local authorities as poisonings by a stranger, and none survived investigation. The two cases still cited are both something else. Timothy O'Bryan died in Deer Park, Texas in 1974 after eating cyanide-laced Pixy Stix given to him by his own father, who wanted the life insurance; Kevin Toston died in 1970 after finding his uncle's heroin, which the family said had been in his Halloween sweets.
The Puritans did oppose Halloween, along with Christmas and the other festivals of the established Church, and almanacs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries give no indication that it was widely celebrated in North America. That is opposition and absence rather than prohibition; the line about the Puritans banning Halloween turns a lack of interest into a law nobody can produce.
Samhain is the name of a date, not of a deity: the Irish sources treat it as one of the four seasonal festivals, and the lord of the dead who turns up in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing is not in them. The related claim that the Church moved All Saints' Day to co-opt Samhain is an argument rather than a record. The adoption of 1 November in 835 is documented; the motive is not.
Adapting the quiz for a classroom, an office, a party or a family table
In a classroom, run it as teams by table, with no elimination and no running total on the board. Ten to fifteen questions is a lesson. The two history sections above are the more useful part of this page for teaching, because each one is a claim, a source and a correction. Skip anything resting on an adult-certificate film.
In an office, cap it at twenty minutes and choose questions with globally recognisable titles: a round built on 1970s and 1980s American cinema quietly excludes anyone who did not grow up with it, which in a mixed international team can be half the room.
At a party, and particularly one where people have been drinking, shorten everything: rounds of five or six, read twice, answers immediately, and no cumulative scoring after the second round. Hand out a printed sheet rather than holding attention by voice alone: paper keeps working when the room gets loud.
At a family table it is a conversation rather than a contest. Let the youngest player answer first, read the context after each answer, and give the point for anything close enough. The film questions reward whoever has watched most; handing that person the questions to read rather than to answer improves the evening for everybody else.
Which questions to hold back for a tiebreak
A tiebreak exists to end an argument, not to start one. That rules out anything contested or needing two names, and rules in numbers and dates, marked nearest without going over.
Three questions here do the job. The date Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in Back to the Future Part II, 21 October 2015, is exact and undisputed. The minimum speed of the bus in Speed, 50 mph, is a number every team will have an opinion about. The time spent on Miller's planet in Interstellar, 23 years 4 months and 8 days, is precise enough that nearest without going over settles it in seconds.
Three to keep out of one: the first celebrity voice in an animated film, which is arguable; the Mad Max extras, which rests on an anecdote rather than a record; and Ghostface's identity, which needs both names and produces a half-point dispute at the worst possible moment. All three are fine mid-round.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to run 50 Halloween trivia questions?
An hour to seventy-five minutes for the full set, reading each question twice, allowing twenty seconds and marking between rounds. With only half an hour, run two whole rounds rather than half of each.
How many questions should I use, and what team size works best?
Ten to fifteen for children under ten, twenty to thirty for a family table or an office, forty to fifty for a full quiz night. Teams of three to five: below three the specialist questions feel unfair, above six the quieter half stops contributing.
Is this quiz suitable for children?
Not on its own. These questions lean on films and pop culture spread across five decades, and a child will score close to nothing, which is the fastest way to lose them. Use the Halloween trivia for kids page in the related list instead.
Can I print these questions and answers?
Yes. The page prints as a question sheet on its own or with the answer key included. It is free and there is no account.
Did Halloween really come from Samhain?
Partly, and less directly than the popular account suggests. Samhain is documented in Irish literature from the ninth century, and Irish and Scottish immigrants carried Halloween customs to North America in the nineteenth. But Ronald Hutton has argued that the medieval records give no evidence that 1 November was a major pan-Celtic festival, and some scholars hold that All Hallows' influenced Samhain as much as the reverse.
Has anyone actually been poisoned by Halloween sweets?
There is no verified case of a child killed or seriously harmed by contaminated sweets handed out by a stranger. Joel Best reviewed newspaper reports from 1958 to 1983 and found fewer than ninety incidents that counted as tampering at all, none attributed to random attempts to harm children. The two deaths always cited were a father poisoning his own son for insurance money in 1974 and a boy who found his uncle's heroin in 1970.
