Alfred Hitchcock Trivia
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110 free Alfred Hitchcock trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Alfred Hitchcock directed more than 50 feature films across six decades, hosted his own television show and put himself in the corner of nearly every picture he made. This Alfred Hitchcock trivia quiz has 110 free questions with answers that span all of it: the silent films and the first British talkie, the Selznick years and Rebecca, the run from Rear Window to The Birds, the late films, and the man himself, from his childhood above a greengrocer's shop to his knighthood four months before he died. It is written for people who have seen the big ones and want to find out how deep their knowledge goes: who wrote the novels, who scored the films, which stars he used four times, what the MacGuffin is and where the term came from. Difficulty climbs from questions any film fan can answer to ones only Hitchcock obsessives will get. Every answer was checked against Hitchcock's Wikipedia biography, which draws on the standard biographies by Spoto, McGilligan and Taylor and on his book-length interview with Truffaut, and each question links to the page that establishes it.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Hitchcock's father sell from the shop the future director was born above in 1899?
Fruit and vegetables
Fruit and vegetables, with poultry on the side: William Hitchcock was a greengrocer and a stern one, and his son recalled a lonely childhood above the shop without a single playmate.
Q 02In Hitchcock's favourite childhood story, what did a policeman do to him at his father's request?
Locked him in a cell
Locked him in a cell, briefly, with a warning that this was what happened to naughty boys; Hitchcock said the sound of that door closing left him with a lifelong fear of the police.
Q 03Hitchcock broke into silent films doing what job for an American studio's new London branch?
Designing title cards
Designing title cards: his evening drawing classes got him hired when the American firm Famous Players-Lasky opened a studio in Islington, and by 1925 he was directing.
Q 04Which silent melodrama, shot near Munich in 1925, was Hitchcock's first feature as director?
The Pleasure Garden
The Pleasure Garden won warm advance reviews, but distributor C. M. Woolf thought it had no commercial appeal and held up its British release until 1927.
Q 05Which silent thriller about a Jack the Ripper-style killer gave Hitchcock his first hit and his first cameo?
The Lodger
The Lodger was nearly shelved after a private screening went badly; a young critic, Ivor Montagu, was brought in to help recut it, and the reworked film became a hit.
Q 06Which Hitchcock film is generally credited as the first British talkie?
Blackmail
Blackmail began as a silent; its star's foreign accent was judged wrong for a London shopgirl, so another actress spoke the lines off camera while she mouthed them.
Q 07Whom did Hitchcock marry at the Brompton Oratory in December 1926?
Alma Reville
Alma Reville had been cutting films since her teens and was already an established editor when Hitchcock met her at the Islington studio; she stayed his closest collaborator for life.
Q 08In Psycho, Hitchcock's daughter Pat plays an office co-worker of which character?
Marion Crane
Marion Crane shares the office with Caroline, played by Pat Hitchcock, who offers her a tranquilizer for her headache shortly before Marion flees with a client's cash.
Q 09What did Hitchcock call the object a thriller's characters chase but its audience barely cares about?
The MacGuffin
The MacGuffin: Hitchcock explained it with a tale of a train passenger whose parcel is a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands, where there are no lions, so it is nothing at all.
Q 10In The 39 Steps, where is the secret the spies are smuggling out of Britain hidden?
In a stage performer's memory
In a stage performer's memory: no papers are missing because the music-hall act Mr Memory has learned the secrets by heart, and asked on stage what the 39 Steps are, he starts to answer.
Q 11Which actress spends much of The 39 Steps handcuffed to Robert Donat's fugitive hero?
Madeleine Carroll
Madeleine Carroll's Pamela does not exist in John Buchan's novel: Hitchcock invented her, and he cast Carroll again in his very next thriller.
Q 12Which Hollywood producer signed Hitchcock to a long-term contract and brought him to America in 1939?
David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick hired him while finishing Gone with the Wind, then kept so tight a grip on scripts and editing that the two quarrelled from their first film together.
Q 13Which film starring Charles Laughton was Hitchcock's last in Britain before he left for Hollywood?
Jamaica Inn
Q 21Which author wrote the novel Strangers on a Train, filmed by Hitchcock in 1951?
Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith was a first-time novelist; the famous name on the film was Raymond Chandler, hired to write the script, who thought it a silly little story and left after falling out with Hitchcock.
Q 22Which Hitchcock film did he shoot in 3D?
Dial M for Murder
Dial M for Murder was filmed in 3D just as the craze was dying, so by the time it opened most cinemas simply showed it flat.
Q 23What keeps James Stewart's photographer stuck in his apartment in Rear Window?
A broken leg
A broken leg, in a plaster cast: the camera almost never leaves his apartment, and the Manhattan courtyard he spies on was one gigantic set built indoors at Paramount.
Jamaica Inn was an unhappy shoot for Hitchcock: Laughton was also its co-producer and kept taking the reins, and Hitchcock found him impossible to work with.
Q 14Which Hitchcock film won the Academy Award for Best Picture?
Rebecca
Rebecca, his first American film, won Best Picture, but that prize went to its producer, so the statuette was never Hitchcock's to keep.
Q 15Which novelist wrote both the novel behind Hitchcock's Best Picture winner and the story behind The Birds?
Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier so disliked the first film he made from her work that she considered refusing him the film rights to her next novel.
Q 16Which Oscar did Hitchcock never win, despite five nominations for it?
Best Director
Best Director: he lost all five times, and the only prize he ever collected at the Oscars was an honorary one, late in his career.
Q 17Which actress won the Best Actress Oscar for the Hitchcock film Suspicion?
Joan Fontaine
Joan Fontaine had been nominated a year earlier for her first Hitchcock film and lost; this time she won, as a bride who comes to suspect that her husband means to kill her.
Q 18Which thriller about a small-town girl's murderous Uncle Charlie did Hitchcock reportedly rank as his own favourite?
Shadow of a Doubt
Shadow of a Doubt needed a believable sleepy town for its killer to hide in, so Hitchcock hired Thornton Wilder, who had written Our Town, to work out the story with him.
Q 19Which surrealist painter designed the dream sequence in Spellbound?
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí and Hitchcock planned a far longer dream, but it proved too complicated: only about two minutes reached the screen, shot in the end under another designer's direction.
Q 20Which substance, hidden by Nazi plotters in Rio, drives the spy plot of Hitchcock's Notorious?
Uranium
Uranium: the script was written before Hiroshima, when his producer found the idea far-fetched, and Hitchcock later claimed that asking a physicist about it got him followed by the FBI.
Q 24Which actress starred in three consecutive Hitchcock films in 1954-55, including Rear Window?
Grace Kelly
Grace Kelly left films in 1956 to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco; her comeback in Marnie was announced six years later, but she withdrew and never worked with Hitchcock again.
Q 25Where is To Catch a Thief set?
The French Riviera
The French Riviera, where Cary Grant's retired cat burglar is blamed for a new string of jewel robberies and decides the only way to clear himself is to catch the copycat.
Q 26Which of his own films did Hitchcock remake in 1956, this time with James Stewart and Doris Day?
The Man Who Knew Too Much
The Man Who Knew Too Much was first made in Britain in 1934; Hitchcock kept its climax for the remake, an assassin waiting for a cymbal crash during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
Q 27Which song from a Hitchcock film won the Academy Award for Best Original Song?
Que Sera, Sera
Que Sera, Sera is part of the plot: Doris Day's character, a retired singer, belts it out at an embassy so that her kidnapped son will hear her and whistle back.
Q 28Which Hitchcock film, based on a real New York court case, was the only one to star Henry Fonda?
The Wrong Man
The Wrong Man retells the 1953 arrest of Manny Balestrero, a nightclub musician whom witnesses picked out as a hold-up man, and Hitchcock shot it in the places where it happened.
Q 29Which camera effect, first used in Vertigo, makes the tower stairwell seem to stretch away beneath Scottie?
The dolly zoom
The dolly zoom pulls the camera back while the lens zooms in, putting the audience inside Scottie's fear of heights; filmmakers still call it the Vertigo effect.
Q 30Which film did Vertigo displace at the top of the BFI critics' poll in 2012?
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane had held first place for fifty years; Vertigo, missing from the top ten until 1982, had climbed to second by 2002 and finally overtook it.