60 free Frankenstein trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
52 free Frankenstein trivia questions with answers. Frankenstein is two stories at once: the 1818 novel a teenage Mary Shelley dreamed up during a rainy summer on Lake Geneva, and the flat-headed, bolt-necked monster that James Whale and Boris Karloff gave the world in 1931. This quiz covers both, plus the Bride, the Hammer films, Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Guillermo del Toro. The easy questions ask who wrote the book, who played the monster and what the villagers burn down. The harder ones get into the novel itself: where Victor studies, what the Creature reads, who Walton is, and why the 1831 edition is not quite the same book as the 1818 one. Expect a few surprises about how much of the 'Frankenstein' everyone pictures was invented by the movies. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the novel, its author and the individual films, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01What is the novel's subtitle?
The Modern Prometheus
Prometheus stole fire from the gods; the label 'modern Prometheus' had been applied by Kant to Benjamin Franklin for his electricity experiments.
Q 02In what year was Frankenstein first published?
1818
The first edition came out anonymously on New Year's Day in London.
Q 03How old was the author when the novel was published?
20
She was 18 when she started it, in the summer of 1816.
Q 04In which English city was the author lodging when she wrote much of the book?
Bath
She attended lectures on medical electricity by Dr Charles Wilkinson, whose laboratory was around the corner from her lodgings.
Q 05Who suggested that the group at Villa Diodati each write a ghost story?
Lord Byron
Byron's own fragment about a vampire was later worked up into a novella by his doctor, John Polidori.
Q 06The gloomy summer of 1816 that kept the group indoors was caused by the eruption of which volcano?
Mount Tambora
1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer across Europe and North America.
Q 07Villa Diodati, where the story was conceived, overlooks which body of water?
Lake Geneva
An astronomer later used the moon's position to date her 'waking dream' to the small hours of 16 June 1816.
Q 08Which book of German ghost stories, read aloud in French translation, entertained the group at the villa?
Fantasmagoriana
Byron's proposal that they 'each write a ghost story' followed those fireside readings.
Q 09Which other landmark horror tale grew out of the same 1816 gathering?
The Vampyre
John Polidori built it from a fragment Byron abandoned, creating the romantic vampire genre.
Q 10Who wrote the preface to the anonymous 1818 first edition?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The book was dedicated to Mary's father, the radical philosopher.
Q 11How many copies were printed of the 1818 first edition?
500
It came out in three volumes, the standard 'triple-decker' format of the day.
Q 12The author's mother, who died days after her birth, was which pioneering feminist writer?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Her 1792 essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman made her one of the founding feminist thinkers.
Q 13The author's father, to whom the book is dedicated, was which philosopher and novelist?
William Godwin
Reviewers sniffed that Frankenstein was a 'feeble imitation' of his novels.
Q 21Who is the ship's captain whose letters frame the whole novel?
Robert Walton
He is leading an expedition to the North Pole when he pulls the dying Victor from the ice.
Q 22What does the Creature say he will do after his maker dies at the end of the novel?
Burn himself on a pyre
He mourns over Victor's body before disappearing onto the ice.
Q 23What does Victor Frankenstein call his creation in the novel?
Nothing; he never names it
Victor calls him wretch, fiend, devil and 'vile insect', but never names him.
Q 14At which university does the scientist study and build the Creature?
Ingolstadt
He leaves home for university after his mother dies of scarlet fever.
Q 15The Frankenstein family belongs to which city, where much of the novel takes place?
Geneva
Victor himself was born in Naples, while his family were staying there.
Q 16Which epic poem does the Creature find and read, later comparing himself to its fallen angel?
Paradise Lost
He tells Victor: 'I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.'
Q 17Who is the first person the Creature murders?
The scientist's brother William
He then plants evidence on the family's servant Justine, who is tried and executed.
Q 18Where does the Creature confront his maker to tell his story and ask for a mate?
On the Mer de Glace
It is a glacier on Mont Blanc, a location Mary Shelley had visited herself.
Q 19In the novel, where does the scientist build, then destroy, the female creature?
The Orkney Islands
He imagines the pair breeding a race of monsters and tears the unfinished body apart.
Q 20Whom does the Creature kill on Victor's wedding night?
His bride Elizabeth
He had promised, 'I shall be with you on your wedding-night', after Victor destroyed his mate.
Q 24Which of these details of the Creature's creation comes from the 1931 film, not the novel?
A jolt of electricity
Shelley leaves the method deliberately vague; Victor spends two years building the body and animates it by an unspecified process.
Q 25The 1831 revised edition changed Elizabeth from the scientist's cousin into what?
An orphan
The 1831 text also dropped the Paradise Lost epigraph and softened many scientific references.
Q 26Which famous novelist praised the book in Blackwood's as an 'extraordinary tale'?
Walter Scott
The Quarterly Review, by contrast, called it 'a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity'.
Q 27The first stage adaptation, Presumption, was performed in London in which year?
1823
Mary Shelley went to see it and wrote 'lo & behold! I found myself famous!'
Q 28Which sci-fi writer argued Frankenstein is the first true science-fiction story?
Brian Aldiss
His case is that Victor 'makes a deliberate decision' and turns to laboratory experiments rather than magic.
Q 29Who directed the 1931 film Frankenstein?
James Whale
He was brought onto the project after Robert Florey, and cast Karloff, who was said to resemble him.
Q 30Who played the Monster in the 1931 film?
Boris Karloff
He was billed in the opening credits only as '?'.