Q 01/05

Which 2025 Ryan Coogler film sets vampires loose on a Mississippi Delta juke joint in 1932?

A) Nosferatu

B) Sinners

C) Weapons

D) Longlegs

Answer · why

B) Sinners

Sinners casts Michael B. Jordan as both of the twin gangsters who open the club. It earned a record 16 Oscar nominations, and Coogler's deal returns o...

Q 02/05

Which novelist critiqued the "Southern Gothic School" in 1935 as full of "aimless violence"?

A) Margaret Mitchell

B) Ellen Glasgow

C) Willa Cather

D) Edith Wharton

Answer · why

B) Ellen Glasgow

Ellen Glasgow, a Virginia novelist of an older school, meant the phrase as a complaint about William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. The insult stuck a...

Q 03/05

Which Mississippi writer, asked if she had been called a Gothic writer, replied, "They better not call me that!"?

A) Flannery O'Connor

B) Eudora Welty

C) Carson McCullers

D) Harper Lee

Answer · why

B) Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty gave that answer in 1973 to a young interviewer named Alice Walker, who went on to write The Color Purple. Critics carried on writing boo...

Q 04/05

Which HBO crime anthology opened in 2014 with McConaughey and Harrelson hunting a ritual killer across the bayous?

A) The Leftovers

B) True Detective

C) Boardwalk Empire

D) The Night Of

Answer · why

B) True Detective

True Detective gave its first season one writer and one director for all eight episodes. Its creator had wanted to set it in Arkansas; HBO moved the s...

Q 05/05

Which master of the macabre, raised in Richmond, is counted among Southern Gothic's earliest practitioners?

A) Edgar Allan Poe

B) Nathaniel Hawthorne

C) Washington Irving

D) Ambrose Bierce

Answer · why

A) Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston but raised in Virginia, and played the Southern gentleman all his life. Critics trace the genre's decaying houses a...