The Black Phone Trivia
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40 free The Black Phone trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Black Phone started as a short story by Joe Hill, sat on Scott Derrickson's shelf for years while he made Sinister and Doctor Strange, and finally became a 2021 Blumhouse hit built out of the director's own memories of a violent 1970s Denver childhood. This The Black Phone trivia quiz covers the film, the story and the 2025 sequel: Finney and Gwen Blake, the Grabber and his three-piece mask, the ghost callers Bruce, Billy, Griffin, Vance and Robin, Gwen's dreams, Max, Samson the dog, and the return trip to Alpine Lake Camp. Easy questions ask who plays the Grabber and what the phone is; harder ones ask which special-effects legend built the masks, what the shoot's fake title was, which state's tax credit helped pay for it, and which video game the Grabber joined in 2025. Black Phone 2 gets a full section, from Ernesto to Lake Maru. Every answer has been checked against a source and each question shows its citation and a short explanation once you answer. Answer it. It's for you.
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Q 01In The Black Phone, which sport links Finney to Bruce, the first ghost to call him?
Baseball
Baseball. Bruce won a game off Finney's pitching and told him his arm was mint; in the basement that same arm swings the phone receiver at the Grabber.
Q 02The Black Phone is based on a 2004 short story by which author?
Joe Hill
Joe Hill, author of Horns and NOS4A2, first published the story in 2004 and writes under a shortened form of his middle name, Hillström, to succeed on his own merits.
Q 03Which short-story collection contains 'The Black Phone', the tale behind the film?
20th Century Ghosts
20th Century Ghosts, the author's 2005 debut book, held the story. In 2021 publishers reissued the whole collection under the title The Black Phone, ahead of the film's release.
Q 04Which actor plays the masked child-killer known as the Grabber?
Ethan Hawke
Ethan Hawke plays the Grabber. He had long avoided villains, believing that once an audience sees the demon inside an actor it never unsees it, but past 50 he decided it was time for a new tool.
Q 05Which young actor made his feature-film debut as Finney in The Black Phone?
Mason Thames
Mason Thames had never made a feature. After months of fruitless searching through agencies, an open call turned up his self-tape, and the director tested him in Zoom callbacks before casting him as Finney Blake.
Q 06Which actress plays Finney's psychic younger sister Gwen?
Madeleine McGraw
Madeleine McGraw so impressed the director that when her Disney series Secrets of Sulphur Springs clashed with the shoot, he moved the whole production by several months to keep her as Gwen.
Q 07The Black Phone is set in 1978 in a suburb of which city, its director's childhood home?
Denver
Denver. The director grew up in a working-class neighbourhood on its north side where fights and beatings were routine, and he folded those memories into the story after working through them in therapy.
Q 08In the first Black Phone film, how is Finney and Gwen's mother said to have died?
By suicide
By suicide, their father says, after psychic dreams tormented her. Black Phone 2 overturns that: the Grabber tells Gwen he murdered her mother and staged the death to look self-inflicted.
Q 09Which friend of Finney's fends off the school bullies before being abducted himself?
Robin
Robin keeps the bullies off Finney until the Grabber takes him too. His ghost makes the last call, coaching Finney to fight back and to pack the phone receiver with dirt as a weapon.
Q 10What does Bruce, the first ghost caller, tell Finney to do?
Remove a floor tile and dig a tunnel
Bruce's advice is to 'Remove a floor tile and dig a tunnel'; the foundations prove too deep, but the pit Finney digs becomes the trap that brings the Grabber down.
Q 11The Grabber leaves the basement door unlocked as a trap: what awaits boys who climb the stairs?
A beating with his belt
A beating with his belt: the Grabber sits waiting at the top of the stairs to punish any boy who tries to leave, a game he calls 'Naughty Boy'. Billy's ghost warns Finney just in time.
Q 12What is the name of the eccentric man the detectives question, who turns out to be living in the Grabber's house?
Max
Max is the Grabber's brother, an amateur sleuth fixated on the case who has no idea the missing boy is under his own feet. When he finally works it out and runs to free Finney, the Grabber kills him with an axe.
Q 13What is the name of the Grabber's dog, whose barking foils one escape?
Samson
Q 21The Black Phone grossed $161 million; roughly what did it cost?
$17 million
$17 million or so: trade reports put the budget at $16-18 million, so the worldwide gross of $161 million came to nearly ten times what the film cost.
Q 22In what film format were Gwen's dream sequences shot?
Super 8
Super 8, the grainy home-movie stock. 'We're shooting the dreams in Super 8,' the director told his cinematographer from the very start, and the footage came out of the camera 'plenty grainy' with no help.
Q 23The Black Phone's cinematographer had just shot which horror film for the directors of Ready or Not?
Scream
Scream wrapped just before Thanksgiving 2020, and only then did Brett Jutkiewicz get the Black Phone script. He was hired within weeks, so he went straight back to the same city to shoot his next horror film.
Samson barks the Grabber awake just as Finney gets out through the front door. In the finale Finney slips past the dog by throwing him frozen meat from the basement freezer.
Q 14In The Black Phone, the feared delinquent Vance is known for his skill at which game?
Pinball
Pinball. 'Pinball Vance' is first seen beating up two boys who spoil his game at a minimart; as a ghost he tells Finney to smash through the basement wall to a freezer in the next room.
Q 15How does Finney finally kill the Grabber?
He breaks his neck with the phone cord
'He breaks his neck with the phone cord' after luring the Grabber into the pit and beating him with the dirt-packed receiver while the dead boys' voices taunt the killer through the phone.
Q 16Where does the Grabber's house turn out to be, relative to the house the police raid?
Directly across the street
Directly across the street: Gwen's vision led the police to the house where the bodies were buried, while the Grabber was holding Finney in the house opposite.
Q 17The Grabber's main mask borrows its expression from the hero of which silent film?
The Man Who Laughs
The Man Who Laughs. Its hero's frozen grin was the one reference the director gave the mask-makers for the smiling mask, and their first sketch came back almost exactly as it appears on screen.
Q 18Which horror-focused production company produced The Black Phone?
Blumhouse
Blumhouse, Jason Blum's horror studio, keeps its budgets small and in return leaves directors in creative control; this one did well enough to bring a sequel, Black Phone 2, in 2025.
Q 19The Black Phone's director made it after quitting the sequel to which Marvel film he had directed?
Doctor Strange
Doctor Strange. He left its sequel, Multiverse of Madness, in January 2020 over creative differences; Sam Raimi took over, and he turned to the Black Phone script he and C. Robert Cargill had already written.
Q 20In which North Carolina city was The Black Phone shot in early 2021?
Wilmington
Wilmington. The shoot hid behind the working title Static, and North Carolina approved a rebate of up to $4.7 million to bring the production to the city's studios.
Q 24Which horror-makeup legend's studio designed and built the Grabber's masks?
Tom Savini
Tom Savini and his partner Jason Baker built the masks in Pittsburgh. Because the star would not fly during the pandemic, they travelled to his New York office to cast his face, then went back again to test the fit.
Q 25Which composer of The Witch and The Lighthouse wrote the synthesizer-heavy score for The Black Phone?
Mark Korven
Mark Korven gave the Grabber his sound by rubbing 'friction mallets', rubber balls on sticks, against walls, mirrors and gongs. He also co-invented the Apprehension Engine, an instrument built purely to make unsettling noises.
Q 26Where did The Black Phone have its world premiere in September 2021?
Fantastic Fest
Fantastic Fest in Austin screened it on 25 September 2021, but cinemas waited nine more months because Universal twice moved the release, finally to June 2022. The sequel premiered at the same festival in 2025.
Q 27What was the tagline on The Black Phone's theatrical poster?
Never talk to strangers
'Never talk to strangers': the Grabber is the stranger of the old warning, a man passing as a magician who climbs out of a black van to snatch boys off the street.
Q 28The Black Phone's script gave the Grabber smiling and frowning masks; which third mask was added?
One with no mouth
One with no mouth. The script's two devil masks echoed theatre's comedy and tragedy pair; the director added a blank third for the Grabber to introduce himself in, thinking 'that could be weird'.
Q 29Derrickson's short 'Dreamkill', set in the Black Phone universe, appears in which anthology film?
V/H/S/85
V/H/S/85 includes 'Dreamkill', in which a teenager named Gunther dreams murders before they happen. His father explains the gift runs in the family: Gunther's cousin Gwen had the same dreams when her brother Finney was taken.
Q 30Black Phone 2's director made which film while its stars aged?
The Gorge
The Gorge. He made it first so that his two young leads would be high-schoolers, which is why the sequel jumps four years to 1982 and plays as a high-school horror film.