The Halloween Franchise: Michael Myers and Haddonfield
Carpenter's original was shot in 20 days over about four weeks in May 1978, on a budget usually given as $300,000 to $325,000, and returned roughly $47 million in the United States and around $70 million worldwide. That ratio is why the franchise never stopped: thirteen films now exist, grossing something in the region of $885 million between them.
They do not tell one story. There is the original run of 1978, 1981, 1988, 1989 and 1995; the standalone Halloween III; the line jumping from Halloween II straight to H20 and Resurrection; Rob Zombie's two remakes; and the 2018 to 2022 trilogy, which treats the 1978 film as the only prior event. Three of those five continuities begin with the same film, so the questions below stay on details that hold whichever timeline your group defends.
The mask is the detail everyone half-knows. Production designer Tommy Lee Wallace bought a shop mask of Captain Kirk, widened the eye holes, altered the hair and sprayed it white. The price is almost always given as $1.98, a figure from crew recollections rather than a receipt, so treat it as the accepted story rather than a documented one. The theme is the other half-fact: Carpenter wrote it in 5/4, often counted as 10/8, which is why it feels unbalanced to listeners who could not say what is odd about it.
Q1.In what year was John Carpenter's original Halloween released?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1978
Q2.What fictional Illinois town is the Halloween series set in?Tap to reveal
Answer: Haddonfield
Q3.Which actress played Laurie Strode in the 1978 original, in her film debut?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jamie Lee Curtis
Q4.Michael Myers's mask was made from a store-bought mask of which TV character?Tap to reveal
Answer: Captain Kirk from Star Trek
A William Shatner mask, widened at the eyes and painted white
Q5.Who played Dr. Samuel Loomis across the original films?Tap to reveal
Answer: Donald Pleasence
Q6.Which actor wore the mask as "The Shape" in the 1978 film?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nick Castle (Tony Moran played the unmasked face at the end)
Q7.Who co-wrote and produced Halloween alongside John Carpenter?Tap to reveal
Answer: Debra Hill
Q8.Carpenter's Halloween theme is written in what unusual time signature?Tap to reveal
Answer: 5/4 (often counted as 10/8)
Q9.Which entry in the series contains no Michael Myers at all?Tap to reveal
Answer: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
The only entry in which Michael Myers is not a character, though two brief scenes from the 1978 film appear inside a TV commercial in the movie
Q10.The Silver Shamrock jingle in Halloween III is set to the tune of which nursery rhyme?Tap to reveal
Answer: London Bridge Is Falling Down
Slasher Classics: Freddy, Jason and Ghostface
The three franchises that defined the slasher era each built an identity on a single visual, and each arrived at it differently. Freddy's glove was designed. Jason's hockey mask was an accident. Ghostface was a shop mask the production had to license.
A Nightmare on Elm Street opened in November 1984 on about $1.1 million and took $57.1 million worldwide. New Line Cinema had mostly distributed other people's films until then, and Elm Street was its first commercial success, which is where "The House That Freddy Built" comes from. Johnny Depp's debut is in the same film.
Friday the 13th is where casual viewers slip hard. Jason kills nobody in the 1980 film: his mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer, is the killer. The hockey mask does not arrive until Part III in 1982, and it arrived by chance — during a lighting test the effects crew did not want to apply make-up, so the film's 3D effects supervisor Martin Jay Sadoff, a hockey fan with a bag of gear on set, produced a Detroit Red Wings goaltender mask. Steve Miner liked it, and a franchise got its logo.
The Ghostface story has been quietly corrected since Scream came out. The mask is Fun World's "Peanut-Eyed Ghost", from a Fantastic Faces line of the early 1990s. Wes Craven said for years that he found it himself, then conceded he had misremembered: producer Marianne Maddalena came across it in a house during location scouting, and the rights had to be negotiated afterwards.
Q1.Which director made both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wes Craven
Q2.In what year was A Nightmare on Elm Street released?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1984
Q3.Who played Freddy Krueger in the original film series?Tap to reveal
Answer: Robert Englund
Q4.Which future star made his film debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street?Tap to reveal
Answer: Johnny Depp
Q5.Which studio's success with Elm Street earned it the nickname "The House That Freddy Built"?Tap to reveal
Answer: New Line Cinema
Q6.Who is the killer in the first Friday the 13th (1980)?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pamela Voorhees, Jason's mother
Q7.Which actress played Mrs. Voorhees?Tap to reveal
Answer: Betsy Palmer
Q8.What is the summer camp in Friday the 13th called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Camp Crystal Lake
Q9.In which film does Jason first wear the hockey mask?Tap to reveal
Answer: Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
Q10.Which actress plays the victim in Scream's opening scene?Tap to reveal
Answer: Drew Barrymore, as Casey Becker
Hocus Pocus, Beetlejuice and the Family Halloween Canon
Hocus Pocus is the clearest case here of a film that was not a hit and became a fixture anyway. Disney released it on 16 July 1993; it opened fourth with $8.1 million behind Jurassic Park, In the Line of Fire and The Firm, and finished at about $53 million against a $28 million budget. Roger Ebert gave it one star. Television made it permanent, through a decade and more of October airings on Disney Channel and Freeform.
Beetlejuice went the other way: a 1988 hit on a $15 million budget, taking around $85 million, and it made Michael Keaton a star despite a fraction of the running time. Its single Academy Award was Best Makeup, shared by Ve Neill, Steve La Porte and Robert Short. That is the question people get wrong most often, because they assume a film that looks like that was rewarded for art direction or visual effects.
Both films do the work a warm-up round needs: half the table can quote them, so the section starts with everybody scoring. Use these ten early, because a table that scores nothing early tends to stop trying.
Q1.In what year was Hocus Pocus released?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1993
Q2.What are the first names of the three Sanderson sisters?Tap to reveal
Answer: Winifred, Sarah and Mary
Q3.Which actress played Winifred Sanderson?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bette Midler
Q4.Which actresses played Sarah and Mary Sanderson?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy
Q5.What object must be lit to resurrect the Sanderson sisters?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Black Flame Candle
Q6.What is the name of the immortal black cat in Hocus Pocus?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thackery Binx
Q7.What Massachusetts city is Hocus Pocus set in?Tap to reveal
Answer: Salem
Q8.Who played Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice?Tap to reveal
Answer: Winona Ryder
Q9.How many times must Beetlejuice's name be said to summon him?Tap to reveal
Answer: Three
Q10.Beetlejuice won a single Academy Award — in which category?Tap to reveal
Answer: Best Makeup
Stop-Motion Halloween: Jack Skellington and Beyond
The most common error in this category is the credit on The Nightmare Before Christmas. Tim Burton wrote the original poem in 1982, developed the story and produced the film, but Henry Selick directed it. The marketing is largely responsible: Disney released it as "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas", and the possessive stuck to the wrong job.
It went out under the Touchstone label rather than Walt Disney Pictures because the studio judged it too dark for children. The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on 9 October 1993, went wide on 29 October, and has taken roughly $109 million across its original run and two decades of re-releases.
Selick went on to direct Coraline in 2009, the first feature made by Laika, which took $188 million on a $60 million budget. This section rewards people who read credits rather than posters, which makes it a good third or fourth round.
Q1.In what year was The Nightmare Before Christmas released?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1993
Q2.Who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: Henry Selick
Q3.What is Jack Skellington's title in Halloween Town?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Pumpkin King
Q4.Who provides Jack Skellington's speaking voice?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chris Sarandon
Q5.Who provides Jack Skellington's singing voice and composed the score?Tap to reveal
Answer: Danny Elfman
Q6.Which actress voices Sally?Tap to reveal
Answer: Catherine O'Hara
Q7.What is the name of the film's boogeyman villain?Tap to reveal
Answer: Oogie Boogie
Q8.In Corpse Bride (2005), who voices the title character, Emily?Tap to reveal
Answer: Helena Bonham Carter
Q9.Coraline (2009) was which animation studio's first feature film?Tap to reveal
Answer: Laika
Q10.In Coraline, what do the Other World's inhabitants have in place of eyes?Tap to reveal
Answer: Buttons
Hauntings, Possessions and Party Staples
This section spans the films put on for atmosphere rather than for jump scares, plus the costume-party regulars half the room can quote. It also carries the awards questions, the best tiebreakers here.
The Exorcist opened on 26 December 1973, drew ten Academy Award nominations and was the first horror film nominated for Best Picture; it won two, for adapted screenplay and sound. The Silence of the Lambs remains the only horror film to have won Best Picture, taking the Big Five sweep of picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay — only the third film to manage that, after It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Get Out won Best Original Screenplay, making Jordan Peele the first African-American winner in that category.
Poltergeist carries a dispute worth knowing before somebody raises it. Tobe Hooper is the credited director; Steven Spielberg wrote and produced it and could not direct because of his contract on E.T. Accounts from the set genuinely conflict — co-producer Frank Marshall said the creative force was Spielberg, while cast members including James Karen and Oliver Robins have said plainly that Hooper directed them — and the Directors Guild arbitrated over how Hooper's credit appeared in the trailers. Who is credited is settled; anything past that is not.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show failed in 1975 and was pulled from its opening cities; its midnight run began at the Waverly Theater in New York in April 1976 and the audience-participation ritual grew out of that run over the months following, and it is now the longest-running theatrical release in film history. Trick 'r Treat was shelved by Warner Bros. and went straight to disc in October 2009.
Q1.In what year was The Exorcist released?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1973
Q2.Which actress played the possessed Regan MacNeil?Tap to reveal
Answer: Linda Blair
Q3.Who provided the demon's voice in The Exorcist?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mercedes McCambridge
Q4.Which film features a young girl announcing "They're here" to a television set?Tap to reveal
Answer: Poltergeist (1982) — the line is Carol Anne's
Q5.What giant creature attacks New York at the end of Ghostbusters (1984)?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
Q6.What is the name of the famous dance number in The Rocky Horror Picture Show?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Time Warp
Q7.Who played Wednesday Addams in the 1991 film The Addams Family?Tap to reveal
Answer: Christina Ricci
Q8.What is the name of the small trick-or-treater who enforces the rules in Trick 'r Treat?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sam
Q9.Get Out won an Academy Award in which category?Tap to reveal
Answer: Best Original Screenplay
How to Run This as a Quiz Round
As one round inside a larger quiz, use ten — a single section read straight down the page — and budget twelve minutes including marking. As a standalone film quiz, use thirty across three sections with a break in the middle, which lands at about forty-five minutes.
Teams of four to six are the right size. Below four the specialist sections feel unfair, because a table simply has nobody who watched stop-motion animation. Above six, half the table stops contributing.
Read each question twice, leave twenty seconds, and take no clarifications from the floor, because one answered query produces eight more. One point per answer, no half points, nothing for spelling. Have teams swap sheets so nobody marks their own. Announce standings after the second section rather than the first, since early scores are mostly noise.
For a wide age range, restructure the room rather than watering the questions down. Put one adult on each team, or run the family and stop-motion sections for everyone and hold the rest back for a shorter adults-only round later. Cutting whole sections preserves the difficulty curve; thinning every section flattens it.
The Questions People Get Wrong, and What to Save for a Tiebreak
The killer in the first Friday the 13th catches the widest range of people, because Jason is the brand and Jason is not the answer. Expect a table to write "Jason", hear "Pamela Voorhees" and appeal. The director of The Nightmare Before Christmas is the same shape of mistake. Read the explanation aloud in both cases: the wrong answer is a reasonable thing to have believed.
Which entry has no Michael Myers divides a room between people who have seen Halloween III and people who have heard of it. The reason is better than the answer: Carpenter and Debra Hill wanted an anthology, a different Halloween story each year. Audiences refused, the film underperformed against the rest of the series, Michael returned in 1988, and the plan died with it.
The Nick Castle question and the 5/4 question are where an obsessive separates from a fan. Keep them, because a section with no ceiling produces a flat scoreboard.
For tiebreaks, use the award categories. Beetlejuice won Best Makeup and Get Out won Best Original Screenplay: both exact and impossible to half-answer. For a numeric tiebreak, ask the release year of the original Halloween and score nearest without going over. The answer is 1978.
The Halloween Behind the Films, and Where the Popular Version Is Wrong
These films borrow their setting from a folk history far less settled than trivia lists suggest, and a host who repeats the tidy version will be corrected from the back of the room.
The straight line from the Gaelic festival of Samhain to modern Halloween is genuinely contested. One body of scholarship treats Halloween customs as descended from Celtic harvest festivals with pre-Christian roots; another argues the holiday began independently as the Christian vigil of All Hallows' Day. Both threads are in the record and the proportions are disputed.
The related claim, that the Church put All Saints' Day on 1 November in order to absorb Samhain, is stated far more confidently than the evidence supports. All Saints was originally kept on 13 May, after Boniface IV rededicated the Pantheon in 609; the Frankish Empire adopted 1 November in 835. Explanations offered for the move include Celtic influence, Germanic influence, and the practical problem that Rome in summer could not house the pilgrims.
Jack-o'-lanterns are older as a phrase than as a practice. The Oxford English Dictionary records "jack-o'-lantern" from 1658, meaning the ignis fatuus over a bog; its application to a carved vegetable is not recorded until 1837. Hollowed turnips and mangel wurzels in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the west of England are a documented nineteenth-century custom, and calling them ancient goes beyond what the sources show.
Trick-or-treating formalised older begging customs rather than inventing anything. Souling is attested in England from at least the fifteenth century, and Shakespeare refers to it in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Halloween guising is recorded in Scotland in 1895, with masqueraders carrying turnip lanterns. The phrase "trick or treat" first appears in print in 1917, in the Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, which makes the earliest documented use Canadian rather than American.
Then the story every Halloween horror film has traded on: poisoned sweets handed to children by strangers. The sociologist Joel Best reviewed newspaper reports from 1958 to 1983 and found fewer than ninety incidents that might qualify as candy tampering at all, none of which he attributed to random attempts to harm children. Of five child deaths initially blamed on homicidal strangers, none survived investigation, and the 1974 case invariably cited was a father who murdered his own son with cyanide. The razor blade in the apple is a horror trope with a real body count of approximately nothing.
Adapting It for a Classroom, an Office, a Party or a Family Table
In a classroom, use the stop-motion and family sections and nothing else. Every film in them is rated PG or lower, and the questions concern plot and credits rather than violence. The Nightmare Before Christmas questions carry a lesson as well: stop-motion is photographed a frame at a time, and directing and producing are different jobs. Run it in teams rather than hands up.
In an office, keep it to one section of ten attached to something else rather than making it the event. Some people will not watch horror at all, and a round they cannot score in is a round they resent. The awards questions give them a way in, being general film knowledge rather than genre knowledge.
At a party, run sections of ten between other things rather than as a block, and announce each section by title first so the table can work out who is answering. That small piece of theatre is what keeps a party quiz sociable.
At a family table, play the family and stop-motion sections together, then let the adults take the franchise section afterwards. One quiz built for both a nine-year-old and someone who owns Halloween on disc produces two bored groups rather than one contented one.
If the group is small, or has been drinking for two hours, halve everything: five questions a section, answers read straight after each question, and no running total. Attention goes first and accuracy second, so shorten before you simplify.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Halloween movies are there?
Thirteen, released between 1978 and 2022. They do not form a single story: Halloween II (1981), Halloween H20 (1998) and the 2018 film are all direct sequels to the original in mutually incompatible timelines, while Rob Zombie's 2007 film restarts it as a remake. Three separate continuities begin with the 1978 film, and Halloween III belongs to none of them.
Why is there no Michael Myers in Halloween III?
It was a deliberate attempt by John Carpenter and Debra Hill to turn Halloween into an anthology series, with a new standalone story each year rather than a recurring killer. Audiences rejected it in 1982, and the film took $14.4 million against a $4.6 million budget, the weakest showing in the series at that point. Michael Myers returned in 1988 and the anthology idea was dropped. Season of the Witch has since been substantially reappraised.
Is The Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween film or a Christmas film?
By the checkable facts: it premiered at the New York Film Festival on 9 October 1993 and went wide on 29 October, its protagonist is the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, and the plot begins the day after Halloween when he wanders into Christmas Town. Which holiday it belongs to is the argument; the release date and the setting are not.
How do I run a movie trivia round for a group with mixed horror tolerance?
Split the round into a franchise block, a family block and a modern block, and alternate between them rather than running all the slasher questions together. Mixing an easy anchor question with a production-credit question in each block keeps casual watchers scoring while still separating the top few players. If part of the room does not watch horror at all, use the family and stop-motion sections as the main quiz and hold the rest back as an optional extra round.
How many questions are on this page, and can I print it?
Forty-nine, arranged as four sections of ten and a final section of nine. The page is free, needs no account, and prints with the answer key attached, so you can hand out question sheets and keep the answers yourself. Nothing here needs a screen, a projector or a sound system.
How long does the full set take to run?
About ninety minutes for all forty-nine with teams of four to six, allowing twenty seconds a question, marking between sections and a break in the middle. One section of ten runs to roughly twelve minutes. To shorten it, remove whole sections rather than trimming each one, because the sections are internally balanced.
Do people need to have seen the films to play?
Not all of them. The questions are pitched at what filters into general knowledge — casting, titles, settings and awards — rather than plot detail that only a recent viewing supplies. The sections that genuinely reward viewing are the franchise and stop-motion ones, which is why they work best late in a quiz rather than first.
