Gremlins Trivia
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47 free Gremlins trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
50 free Gremlins trivia questions with answers. Gremlins arrived in the summer of 1984 as a Christmas movie with teeth: a cute mogwai, three rules nobody follows, and a small town overrun by reptilian imps. This quiz covers the whole franchise, from the spec script written in a mouse-infested loft to the 1990 sequel that turned a Manhattan skyscraper into a playground for a Brain, a bat and a very forward female gremlin, and on to the animated prequel set in 1920s Shanghai. Easy questions cover the rules, the cast and who voices Gizmo. Harder ones dig into the creature effects, the department store where the villain meets sunlight, the actor behind Mr. Wing, the toy and cereal tie-ins, the video game that closed out an Atari console, and how two Spielberg productions forced the MPAA to invent PG-13. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other primary pages, and the citation sits under each question, so you can settle any argument about whether Gremlins counts as a Christmas film. Built for movie nights, 80s nostalgia rounds and anyone who has ever set a clock forward to see what happens.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who directed the 1984 film Gremlins?
Joe Dante
Joe Dante was down to his last few dollars when Steven Spielberg's script arrived in the mail, and he assumed it had been sent to the wrong address.
Q 02Which screenwriter sold Gremlins to Steven Spielberg as a spec script, then wrote The Goonies for him?
Chris Columbus
Chris Columbus wrote Gremlins as a writing sample he never expected to see filmed, inspired by mice skittering around his loft at night; he later directed Home Alone.
Q 03Rand Peltzer buys the mogwai as a Christmas present in an antique store located in which neighborhood?
Chinatown
Chinatown is where the shop's owner refuses to sell the mogwai, so his grandson slips it to Rand behind his back, along with three rules for its care.
Q 04In Gremlins, which mogwai rule does the shopkeeper's grandson call the most important?
never feed it after midnight
Never feed it after midnight is the rule he says can never be forgotten, though nobody defines when 'after midnight' ends, a gap the studio queried and the sequel openly mocks.
Q 05What is the name of the snowy small town where Billy Peltzer works at the local bank?
Kingston Falls
Kingston Falls is the town; its picture-postcard setting deliberately echoes It's a Wonderful Life, a clip of which plays on television in the film.
Q 06Which actor plays Billy Peltzer?
Zach Galligan
Zach Galligan, a relative unknown, won the part of Billy after Spielberg saw his screen test with the actress cast as Kate and pushed for him.
Q 07Which Fast Times at Ridgemont High actress plays Billy's girlfriend Kate Beringer?
Phoebe Cates
Phoebe Cates won the part of Kate despite studio worries that her risqué role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High made her a poor fit for the sweet girl next door.
Q 08Which country singer-songwriter plays Billy's inventor father, Randall Peltzer?
Hoyt Axton
Hoyt Axton got the part after the director saw him play the folksy father in The Black Stallion and decided the singer was also a seriously good actor.
Q 09The actor who plays Rand Peltzer wrote which 1971 Three Dog Night song that spent six weeks at No. 1?
Joy to the World
Joy to the World nearly went unrecorded: two of Three Dog Night's three lead singers dismissed it as a silly kids' song before the third talked them into it.
Q 10Who provided the voice of Gizmo in Gremlins?
Howie Mandel
Howie Mandel got the job when a friend already voicing a gremlin urged him to audition, and he improvised much of Gizmo's chatter to match the finished puppet footage.
Q 11Which longtime Scooby-Doo voice actor voiced the gremlins' leader in Gremlins?
Frank Welker
Frank Welker and his fellow voice actors mostly made up the creatures' lines themselves, reacting to puppet footage that had been shot before any voices were recorded.
Q 12What is the aggressive mogwai leader, named for the white tuft on his head, called?
Stripe
Stripe is the leader; in the original draft Gizmo himself was to turn into the villain, but Spielberg vetoed it because audiences would want the cute mogwai kept around.
Q 13In Gremlins, the last surviving gremlin tries to spawn more of his kind in which department store's fountain?
Montgomery Ward
Q 21Which film was the first released theatrically under the new PG-13 rating in 1984?
Red Dawn
Red Dawn reached theaters with the new rating on August 10, 1984; The Flamingo Kid had been the first film awarded a PG-13 but was not released until December.
Q 22Who composed the score for Gremlins, including the mischievous 'Gremlin Rag'?
Jerry Goldsmith
Jerry Goldsmith answered a horror film with a jaunty, carnival-style rag, and he turns up on screen as the man in the phone booth when Rand calls home from the convention.
Q 23The composer of Gremlins won his only Academy Award, from 18 nominations, for which film?
The Omen
It is the Montgomery Ward store; the leader had left the cinema early for candy across the street, which is why he alone survived the gas explosion that killed the rest.
Q 14In Gremlins, how does Kate say her father died, in her speech about hating Christmas?
Broke his neck in a chimney
Broke his neck in a chimney: Kate says he slipped climbing down it dressed as Santa, and the director refused to cut the speech, arguing it summed up the film's mix of horror and comedy.
Q 15Which future Goonies star plays Pete Fountaine, the kid who accidentally spills water on Gizmo?
Corey Feldman
Corey Feldman says the role repaid a promise: Steven Spielberg had talked him out of E.T. after a rewrite shrank his part, vowing to cast him in his next film with a kid.
Q 16The Gremlins town square was filmed on the Universal studio set that became the hometown in which 1985 hit?
Back to the Future
Back to the Future turned the same Courthouse Square into Hill Valley a year later; Gremlins shot there because its director wanted a stylised backlot town, where puppet monsters would be easier to believe.
Q 17Gremlins opened in North America on June 8, 1984, the same day as which other blockbuster?
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters won that opening weekend by only about $1 million, even though Gremlins had cost less than half as much to make.
Q 18Before settling on puppets, the makers of Gremlins tested which animal wearing a gremlin head?
A monkey
A monkey was the early plan, but the rhesus they tested in a gremlin head panicked, tore around the editing room and soiled everything, so the film switched to puppets.
Q 19In Gremlins, which Disney classic is the horde watching when Billy blows up the movie theater?
Snow White
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has the whole horde packed into one cinema, which is what lets Billy and Kate wipe out all but one of them with a single gas explosion.
Q 20Violence in Gremlins and which other 1984 PG film prompted the PG-13 rating?
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released weeks before Gremlins, drew the same complaints; Spielberg, connected to both, suggested an intermediate rating and the MPAA created PG-13 in July 1984.
The Omen won with a menacing choral chant, 'Ave Satani', while the composer's scores for Patton and Planet of the Apes were among the 17 nominations that lost.
Q 24Gremlins puppet designer Chris Walas later won a makeup Oscar for which film?
The Fly
The Fly won Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis the makeup Oscar for Jeff Goldblum's slow transformation into an insect, and Walas went on to direct the sequel, The Fly II, himself.
Q 25In the darker original Gremlins script, whose severed head was thrown down the stairs?
Billy's mother
Billy's mother was decapitated in the first draft, a scene cut as too dark; on screen she instead kills three gremlins in her own kitchen, with a blender, a knife and a microwave.
Q 26Gremlins was the first film to carry which production company's now-famous logo?
Amblin Entertainment
Amblin Entertainment's logo, a boy and E.T. cycling across the moon, debuted on Gremlins, a film Steven Spielberg had first pictured as a cheap horror movie rather than a family hit.
Q 27In Gremlins, which World War II veteran is the first to call the creatures gremlins?
Mr. Futterman
Mr. Futterman, Billy's neighbor, blames gremlins for every foreign-made machine that breaks, an old airmen's joke from the war, until real ones turn up and leave him badly injured.
Q 28Steven Spielberg considered which filmmaker, then known only for short films, to direct Gremlins?
Tim Burton
Tim Burton was in the running on the buzz around his early shorts, but he had never directed a feature, which counted against him; his first, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, arrived in 1985.
Q 29Which children's author, a former fighter pilot, published a book called The Gremlins in 1943?
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl drew The Gremlins from RAF folklore about imps that sabotage aircraft; it was his first book, written for Walt Disney ahead of an animated film that was never made.
Q 30Which creature feature, advertised with a monster climbing out of a toilet, was filmed at the same time as Gremlins?
Ghoulies
Ghoulies is often written off as a Gremlins imitation, but the two were shot at the same time; its producer ran out of money mid-shoot, so Gremlins reached theaters seven months sooner.