Thriller Movies
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50 free Thriller Movies trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Thrillers are built to keep you guessing, which makes them perfect quiz material. The genre runs from Alfred Hitchcock's suspense classics through the paranoid conspiracy films of the 1970s to the manhunts and twist endings of more recent decades, and nearly every one has a scene, a villain or a reveal that audiences never forgot. This quiz covers the films and the people who made them: plots and famous set pieces, the actors behind the great heroes and villains, directors and composers, Oscar winners, and the production stories behind well-known moments. Questions range from blockbusters most filmgoers have seen to noir and European classics that reward the dedicated fan. It is for movie-night hosts, pub quiz writers and anyone who likes to test how closely they were watching. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up a new story even when you miss one.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Alfred Hitchcock thriller used chocolate syrup as blood in its black-and-white murder scene?
Psycho
Psycho used Hershey's syrup because it photographed better in black and white than stage blood. The stabbing sound was a melon being punctured.
Q 02What nickname did the Jaws crew give their mechanical shark, after Steven Spielberg's lawyer?
Bruce
Bruce broke down so often in salt water that Spielberg mostly suggested the shark's presence instead, using John Williams's ominous theme.
Q 03Which actor won an Oscar as cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs?
Anthony Hopkins
Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor as the film became only the third to sweep the five top Academy Awards. Brian Cox had played Lecter first, in Manhunter.
Q 04Which South Korean thriller became the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar?
Parasite
Parasite, Bong Joon Ho's story of a poor family working its way into a rich household, also won Best Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature.
Q 05Which 1987 thriller starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas inspired the slang term bunny boiler?
Fatal Attraction
Fatal Attraction gave rise to the term through the scene where a spurned lover boils the family's pet rabbit. It grew out of writer James Dearden's short film Diversion.
Q 06Which 1994 thriller traps Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock on a Los Angeles bus wired with a bomb?
Speed
Speed had its dialogue reworked by Joss Whedon just a week before filming began. It was Jan de Bont's first feature as a director.
Q 07Which 1999 M. Night Shyamalan thriller follows a child therapist counselling a boy who sees ghosts?
The Sixth Sense
The Sixth Sense was the second-highest-grossing film of 1999 and earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.
Q 08On which American landmark does the final chase of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest take place?
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore's carved presidents loom over the finale of a film that earlier sends Cary Grant running from a crop-duster plane.
Q 09Which actress won an Oscar as obsessed fan Annie Wilkes in the Stephen King thriller Misery?
Kathy Bates
Kathy Bates was a stage actress, mostly unknown to film audiences, when she was cast opposite James Caan as the novelist her character holds captive.
Q 10Which Christopher Nolan thriller about an amnesiac hunting a killer shows its scenes in reverse order?
Memento
Memento grew out of a short story by the director's brother, Jonathan Nolan, and the film's screenplay earned an Oscar nomination.
Q 11Which 1995 thriller pairs Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as detectives hunting a killer in an unnamed city?
Seven
Seven kept its bleak ending because Brad Pitt agreed to star only if it stayed. Its murderer bases each crime on one of the deadly sins.
Q 12Which 1995 thriller builds to the unmasking of the legendary crime lord Keyser Söze?
The Usual Suspects
The Usual Suspects takes its title from a line spoken by Claude Rains in Casablanca. Kevin Spacey won an Oscar as the small-time con man Verbal Kint.
Q 13Which Alfred Hitchcock thriller has James Stewart's injured photographer spying on his neighbours?
Rear Window
Rear Window was shot entirely on one enormous indoor set at Paramount, built to replicate a Greenwich Village apartment block.
Q 21Which actress won an Oscar as fragile ballerina Nina Sayers in the 2010 thriller Black Swan?
Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman's dancer is cast in Swan Lake and loses her grip on reality while competing with a rival played by Mila Kunis.
Q 22Which sketch comedian made his directing debut with Get Out, winning a screenwriting Oscar?
Jordan Peele
Jordan Peele, half of the comedy duo behind Key & Peele, became the first African-American winner of the Best Original Screenplay award.
Q 23Which computer hacker created by Stieg Larsson helps a journalist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
Lisbeth Salander
Q 14Which 2014 David Fincher thriller casts Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a husband suspected of murder?
Gone Girl
Gone Girl was adapted by Gillian Flynn from her own 2012 novel, with Rosamund Pike as the missing wife.
Q 15Which Martin Scorsese thriller sends U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels to an asylum in Boston Harbor?
Shutter Island
Shutter Island stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as the marshals, and is adapted from a novel by Dennis Lehane.
Q 16Which actress shot to fame as crime novelist Catherine Tramell in the 1992 thriller Basic Instinct?
Sharon Stone
Sharon Stone was relatively unknown when she won the part, after several prominent actresses had turned it down.
Q 17Which actor won an Oscar as relentless hitman Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men?
Javier Bardem
Javier Bardem's character lets a gas station owner live for correctly calling a coin toss, in a film that also won Best Picture.
Q 18Which postwar European city is the setting of The Third Man, the 1949 thriller scored on a zither?
Vienna
Vienna's sewers stage the film's climactic chase, as Orson Welles's Harry Lime flees underground from the police.
Q 19Which thriller did Martin Scorsese remake in 1991, with Robert De Niro as ex-convict Max Cady?
Cape Fear
Cape Fear's remake gave cameos to Gregory Peck and Martin Balsam, who had starred in the 1962 original; it was Peck's final theatrical film.
Q 20Which 1993 thriller won Tommy Lee Jones an Oscar for hunting wrongly convicted surgeon Richard Kimble?
The Fugitive
The Fugitive was based on a 1960s TV series often linked to the Sam Sheppard murder case, a link its creator denied. Harrison Ford plays the man on the run.
Lisbeth Salander was Larsson's idea of what Pippi Longstocking might have been like as an adult.
Q 24Which model, spotted by Alfred Hitchcock in a television commercial, landed the lead in The Birds?
Tippi Hedren
Tippi Hedren was noticed in an advert for a diet drink. Her daughter Melanie Griffith and granddaughter Dakota Johnson became actresses too.
Q 25Which composer scored Citizen Kane and then Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and North by Northwest?
Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann worked on nine Hitchcock films and recorded his final score, for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, shortly before his death.
Q 26Which 1944 Ingrid Bergman thriller gave its name to a term for making someone doubt their own sanity?
Gaslight
Gaslight's heroine watches her lamps dim for no apparent reason while her husband manipulates her; the role won Bergman a Best Actress Oscar.
Q 27Which comedy star plays gambling-addicted jeweller Howard Ratner in the 2019 crime thriller Uncut Gems?
Adam Sandler
Adam Sandler's character must retrieve an opal to pay off his debts, in a film that gave the singer The Weeknd his debut role.
Q 28In which city does James Stewart's retired detective trail Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo?
San Francisco
San Francisco locations fill a film that replaced Citizen Kane at the top of Sight & Sound's greatest-films poll in 2012.
Q 29What term did Alfred Hitchcock popularise for an object that drives a plot but barely matters itself?
MacGuffin
MacGuffin was coined by Angus MacPhail, and Hitchcock made it famous with The 39 Steps, where it is a set of incidental military secrets.
Q 30Which actor plays Jason Bourne, a man with amnesia and a mysterious CIA past, in The Bourne Identity?
Matt Damon
Matt Damon's hero comes from a 1980 novel by Robert Ludlum; Jeremy Renner's The Bourne Legacy follows a different agent, Aaron Cross.