Vertigo Trivia
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50 free Vertigo trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Vertigo flopped politely in 1958, vanished from cinemas for years, and then in 2012 knocked Citizen Kane off the top of the Sight & Sound poll. This quiz covers the whole strange arc of Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco obsession: the Boileau-Narcejac novel, Vera Miles's pregnancy and Kim Novak's casting, the invented character of Midge, Carlotta Valdes and her portrait, Fort Point, the missing bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista, the redwoods that were not Muir Woods, and Judy's green-lit room at the Empire Hotel. The craft questions dig into the dolly zoom and the uncredited cameraman who devised it, Bernard Herrmann's Wagner-soaked score recorded in London during a strike, Saul Bass's spirals, John Whitney's anti-aircraft-computer titles, Edith Head's colour scheme, the alternative ending, the 1983 reissue and the argued-over 1996 restoration. Easy questions suit anyone who has seen the film once; the expert tier is for people who know Scottie's street address. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the film, Kim Novak, the source novel, Bernard Herrmann and the dolly zoom, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. For the director's whole career, try our Alfred Hitchcock quiz.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Hitchcock film followed Vertigo?
North by Northwest
North by Northwest. Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman were meant to be adapting the novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare for MGM, got stuck, and invented this cross-country chase instead.
Q 02Who plays retired detective John 'Scottie' Ferguson in Vertigo?
James Stewart
James Stewart. Columbia lent Kim Novak to Paramount for Vertigo only as a trade: Stewart had to make Bell, Book and Candle with her for Columbia straight afterwards.
Q 03Vertigo was adapted from a 1954 French novel by which writing duo?
Boileau-Narcejac
Boileau-Narcejac. An earlier novel of theirs became Clouzot's 1955 hit Les Diaboliques, and Paramount bought this one for Hitchcock before it had an English translation.
Q 04What is the clinical name for the fear that ends Scottie's police career in Vertigo?
Acrophobia
Acrophobia. Scottie finds out he has it while dangling from a rooftop gutter, as the policeman reaching down to save him falls to his death.
Q 05Which camera effect was devised for Vertigo's dizzying shots down the bell-tower stairs?
Dolly zoom
Dolly zoom. Paramount cameraman Irmin Roberts worked it out: the lens zooms in while the camera tracks back, so the stairwell seems to stretch away beneath Scottie.
Q 06How was Vertigo's famous shot down the bell-tower stairwell actually filmed?
Horizontally, using a scale model
Horizontally, using a scale model. A rig to hang the camera above a full-size stairwell was priced too high, so Hitchcock had a miniature laid on its side and filmed along the floor.
Q 07Which actress plays Midge, Scottie's loyal friend and former fiancée, in Vertigo?
Barbara Bel Geddes
Barbara Bel Geddes. Midge isn't in the novel: screenwriter Samuel Taylor invented her with his friend Bel Geddes in mind, two decades before she became Miss Ellie in Dallas.
Q 08Which actress was first cast as Vertigo's Madeleine but withdrew when she became pregnant?
Vera Miles
Vera Miles. She had finished her costume tests, but Hitchcock's gallbladder surgery pushed the shoot back by months, and by the new start date she was expecting.
Q 09In Vertigo, Midge is drawing an ad for which garment, built like a cantilever bridge?
A brassiere
A brassiere. Midge tells Scottie it has no shoulder or back straps and was designed by an aircraft engineer in his spare time.
Q 10In Vertigo, Madeleine keeps a room in Carlotta Valdes's old house, by then which hotel?
McKittrick Hotel
McKittrick Hotel. Decades later the immersive theatre hit Sleep No More borrowed the name for its New York venue in tribute to the film.
Q 11At which real California mission does Vertigo's Madeleine fall from the bell tower?
Mission San Juan Bautista
Mission San Juan Bautista. The real mission had no bell tower left to fall from by 1957, so the one on screen was a studio creation, added to the shots with matte paintings.
Q 12In Vertigo, where does Madeleine jump into San Francisco Bay?
Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge
Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge. Scottie dives in after her and takes her home unconscious, where she wakes in his bed with her clothes drying in the kitchen.
Q 13Which museum houses the Portrait of Carlotta in Vertigo?
Q 21Which Wagner opera does Vertigo's score extensively reference?
Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde. The love theme shadows the opera's Liebestod, the 'love-death' Isolde sings over Tristan's body, a pointed model for a film about loving a dead woman.
Q 22Which graphic designer created Vertigo's spiral-themed title sequence and poster?
Saul Bass
Saul Bass. His spirals are Lissajous figures, curves from nineteenth-century mathematics, drawn for him by machine by the animator John Whitney.
Q 23Which Lady Gaga hit name-checks Vertigo alongside two other Hitchcock films in one verse?
Bad Romance
Bad Romance. The verse runs through Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window in two lines; Gaga said she meant wanting the darkest, sickest parts of a lover.
California Palace of the Legion of Honor
California Palace of the Legion of Honor. The scene was filmed in the real gallery, among the museum's own paintings, but Carlotta's portrait was a prop made for the film.
Q 14Which park near Hitchcock's Santa Cruz Mountains home supplied the redwood grove in Vertigo?
Big Basin Redwoods State Park
Big Basin Redwoods State Park. On screen it passes for Muir Woods, the famous redwood park just north of San Francisco.
Q 15Carlotta Valdes's grave in Vertigo lies in the cemetery of which San Francisco landmark?
Mission Dolores
Mission Dolores. The prop headstone stayed in the mission's graveyard after the shoot, a draw for the film's fans, until the mission had it removed.
Q 16In which real San Francisco restaurant, since closed, does Scottie first set eyes on Madeleine?
Ernie's
Ernie's. It was Hitchcock's own choice of restaurant, but the red-walled dining room on screen is a replica built at Paramount, exterior included.
Q 17On which famous San Francisco street is Scottie's apartment in Vertigo?
Lombard Street
Lombard Street. His flat at number 900 sits a block below the street's famous crooked stretch, and Madeleine finds her way back to it by steering for Coit Tower.
Q 18What is Hitchcock doing in his Vertigo cameo?
Walking past a shipyard
Walking past a shipyard. He crosses in front of the shipbuilder's office about eleven minutes in; he liked to get his cameo over early so audiences would stop looking for him.
Q 19Who composed the swirling orchestral score for Vertigo?
Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann. The partnership ended badly eight years later, when Hitchcock threw out his score for Torn Curtain and the two men never worked together again.
Q 20Why was Vertigo's score recorded in London and Vienna rather than Hollywood?
A musicians' strike in the United States
A musicians' strike in the United States. The composer could not conduct, so Muir Mathieson began recording in London, and when the players there walked out in sympathy the rest was finished in Vienna.
Q 24Which costume designer worked with Hitchcock on Vertigo's colour-coded wardrobe?
Edith Head
Edith Head. Grey was picked for Madeleine's suit because it jars on a blonde, and Hitchcock told Head that Kim Novak could wear anything she liked, so long as it was a grey suit.
Q 25Vertigo's unused ending has Midge hear what on the radio?
Gavin Elster being hunted in Europe
Gavin Elster being hunted in Europe. Hollywood's censors wanted the murderer seen to face justice, so Hitchcock shot the scene to satisfy them, then left it out of the finished film.
Q 26What was Vertigo's working title during production?
From Among the Dead
From Among the Dead. It is the literal English of the French novel's title, D'entre les morts; François Truffaut claimed the book was written to tempt Hitchcock, which one of its authors later denied.
Q 27Maxwell Anderson's rejected Vertigo script, Darkling, I Listen, took its title from which Keats poem?
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode to a Nightingale. The line opens the stanza in which the poet admits to being 'half in love with easeful Death', apt for a story about a man in love with a dead woman.
Q 28Which widescreen process, running the film sideways through the camera, was used to shoot Vertigo?
VistaVision
VistaVision. Paramount's alternative to CinemaScope exposed a far larger negative than ordinary 35mm, which is why the 1996 restoration could be printed up to 70mm.
Q 29In which poll did Vertigo replace Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made in 2012?
Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound. Citizen Kane had topped the magazine's once-a-decade critics' poll for fifty years, and Vertigo had not even made its top ten in 1962 or 1972.
Q 30Which film replaced Vertigo at the top of the 2022 critics' poll of the greatest films ever made?
Jeanne Dielman
Jeanne Dielman. Chantal Akerman's 1975 film, over three hours of a Brussels widow's household routine, was the first directed by a woman to top the poll, having sat outside the top thirty a decade earlier.