Horror
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163 free Horror trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free horror trivia questions with answers. From the shadowy corridors of Psycho to the sunlit dread of Midsommar, horror has evolved from cheap thrills into one of the most respected genres in entertainment. Do you have what it takes to face 163 questions about the things that go bump in the night?
30 of 163 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the 1960 film Psycho, where does Marion Crane stop for the night and meet her fate?
Bates Motel
Bates Motel is where Psycho kills off its star well before the halfway mark; Hitchcock had cinemas turn away anyone who arrived after the film had started, an unusual rule at the time.
Q 02Which author wrote the 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus?
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at 18, after Lord Byron challenged his guests at Lake Geneva in 1816 to each write a ghost story; the novel first appeared anonymously.
Q 03What is the name of the killer in the Friday the 13th franchise who wears a hockey mask?
Jason Voorhees
Jason Voorhees is the iconic hockey-masked killer of the Friday the 13th series. Interestingly, he didn't get the hockey mask until Part III (1982) — in Part 2 he wore a burlap sack.
Q 04In The Shining, what has Wendy's husband typed endlessly in his manuscript?
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy fills the whole manuscript; for foreign prints Kubrick reshot the pages with local sayings, so the German Jack types a proverb about never putting things off until tomorrow.
Q 05Which 2017 Jordan Peele film follows a Black man visiting his white girlfriend's family?
Get Out
Get Out was the directing debut of Jordan Peele, until then known for sketch comedy; he calls it a 'social thriller', a film in which society itself is the villain, and it won him a screenplay Oscar.
Q 06What is the name of the demonic entity terrorizing the Perron family in The Conjuring (2013)?
Bathsheba
Bathsheba is, in the film, an accused witch who cursed everyone who would ever take her land, and she ends up possessing the mother, Carolyn; the story draws on the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Q 07In the Scream franchise, what is the name of the masked killer?
Ghostface
Ghostface is the identity adopted by different killers across the Scream series. The mask was an off-the-shelf Halloween costume made by the Fun World company before Wes Craven picked it for the film.
Q 08Which Stephen King novel features a telekinetic teenage girl who unleashes her powers at prom?
Carrie
Carrie nearly ended in the trash: Stephen King threw away its first pages, and his wife Tabitha fished them out and urged him to finish what became his first published novel.
Q 09What type of creature is Count Orlok in the 1922 film Nosferatu?
Vampire
Vampire Count Orlok is Dracula under another name: Murnau filmed Bram Stoker's novel without permission, Stoker's widow sued, and a court ordered every copy destroyed, though a few prints survived.
Q 10Who directed and starred in the 2018 horror film A Quiet Place?
John Krasinski
John Krasinski directed A Quiet Place and played the father opposite his wife, Emily Blunt; he also pushed to cast a deaf actress, Millicent Simmonds, as the family's deaf daughter.
Q 11Which horror film features the line "They're here" spoken by a young girl watching television static?
Poltergeist
Poltergeist's 'They're here' belongs to little Carol Anne Freeling; Tobe Hooper is the credited director because co-writer and producer Steven Spielberg was tied up with E.T., which opened a week later.
Q 12Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" features a bird that repeatedly says which word?
Nevermore
Nevermore needed a speaker without reason, Poe wrote: he first thought of a parrot, then chose a raven as equally able to talk and far better suited to the poem's gloom.
Q 13Which fictional Maine town is the setting of Stephen King's It and Insomnia?
Derry
Q 21Which Lovecraft entity is described as a giant octopus-dragon hybrid sleeping beneath the ocean?
Cthulhu
Cthulhu almost stayed unpublished: Weird Tales first rejected the story, and its editor relented only after Lovecraft's friend Donald Wandrei bluffed that Lovecraft would take it elsewhere.
Q 22Which 1999 film follows three student filmmakers who vanish in the Maryland woods?
The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project grossed nearly $250 million after a marketing campaign that listed its three little-known actors as 'missing' or 'deceased'.
Q 23Which actor played Freddy Krueger in the original 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street?
Robert Englund
Derry is Stephen King's portrait of Bangor, the Maine city where he has a home, as he told his biographer; the town turns up again when the hero of 11/22/63 passes through.
Q 14Which film was the first horror movie nominated for the Best Picture Oscar?
The Exorcist
The Exorcist drew on a real case: the novel behind it was inspired by reports of a 1949 exorcism of a teenage boy, and the film earned ten Oscar nominations in all.
Q 15In the Saw films, which tricycle-riding puppet with spiral cheeks and red eyes delivers Jigsaw's recorded messages?
Billy
Billy was made by hand: director James Wan built the first puppet himself from papier-mâché and paper towel rolls, and the sequel upgraded it with remote-controlled eyes and jaw.
Q 16What is the name of the clown in Stephen King's novel It?
Pennywise
Pennywise began as a fairy-tale troll: King pictured one living in a city's sewers rather than under a bridge, then gave it a clown's shape because, he said, clowns scare children more than anything.
Q 17Which 2018 Ari Aster horror film follows a family unraveling after their grandmother's death?
Hereditary
Hereditary built nearly every room of the family home on a soundstage, so walls could be pulled away and scenes shot from far back, which makes the house look like a dollhouse.
Q 18Michael Myers's Halloween mask began as a mask of which actor?
William Shatner
William Shatner it was: the crew bought a Captain Kirk mask on Hollywood Boulevard, enlarged the eyeholes and painted the face white; Shatner said that when he first heard, he thought it was a joke.
Q 19Who played Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining?
Shelley Duvall
Shelley Duvall was nominated for a Worst Actress Razzie for the role in 1981; the awards withdrew it in 2022, citing Kubrick's alleged treatment of her on set.
Q 20In Bram Stoker's Dracula, which English solicitor travels to Transylvania to meet the Count?
Jonathan Harker
Jonathan Harker opens Dracula (1897) with his journal of the journey to Castle Dracula, where he becomes the Count's prisoner before escaping.
Robert Englund was until then best known as Willie, an alien who joins the human resistance in the miniseries V; he went on to play Freddy in eight films before Jackie Earle Haley took over for the 2010 remake.
Q 24Which Netflix series did the Duffer Brothers create as a love letter to Spielberg and Stephen King?
Stranger Things
Stranger Things was turned down more than a dozen times by networks that wanted the Duffers to make it a kids' show or drop its child leads, before Netflix said yes.
Q 25In Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Leatherface wears masks made from what?
Human skin
Human skin makes up every one of Leatherface's masks; actor Gunnar Hansen recalled that his costume was never washed during the shoot, because the crew feared the laundry would lose it or change its colour.
Q 26What narrative format does the TV series American Horror Story use?
Anthology
Anthology here means each season restarts with a new story and setting while a repertory cast returns as new characters, which let Jessica Lange win two Emmys across its seasons.
Q 27Which Spielberg thriller kept its monster mostly out of sight because the mechanical models kept breaking down?
Jaws
Jaws had three mechanical sharks, all nicknamed Bruce after Spielberg's lawyer; salt water wrecked their pneumatics, so he mostly suggested the shark's presence with John Williams's ominous theme.
Q 28Which subgenre do The Haunting and Rosemary's Baby, both from the 1960s, exemplify?
Psychological horror
Psychological horror keeps the threat in the mind: The Haunting's screenwriter read the novel it adapts as one woman's breakdown rather than a ghost story, and wrote her unravelling into the film.
Q 29Who won an Oscar for playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)?
Anthony Hopkins
Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor although Hannibal Lecter is on screen for well under half an hour of the film, a tally often given as about 16 minutes.
Q 30In Alien (1979), what is the name of the spaceship whose crew encounters the xenomorph?
Nostromo
Nostromo borrows its name from Joseph Conrad's 1904 novel, and the sequel kept the habit: the Marines' ship in Aliens, the Sulaco, is named from the same book.