Horror Movies Trivia Quiz: Final Girls and Cursed Tapes

Trivia Quizzes Movies

Jamie Lee Curtis made her film debut in Halloween in 1978, playing a babysitter in the small Illinois town of Haddonfield, and her mother was Janet Leigh, the woman stabbed in the shower in Psycho eighteen years earlier. The coincidence sums up the genre, in which each generation of filmmakers rebuilds the scares it grew up on, sometimes borrowing the actors too. John Carpenter shot Halloween on a small budget, wrote its score himself, and gave his killer a mask the crew made from a cheap Captain Kirk mask painted white. Michael Myers walks slowly, never speaks and cannot be reasoned with, and that template held for a decade of imitators.

Friday the 13th followed in 1980 with a twist that still catches out people who know the franchise only from its posters. The killer in the first film is Pamela Voorhees, the mother of a boy who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake, and her son Jason does not take over until the sequel. He picks up the hockey mask in the third film. Wes Craven pushed the formula into dreams with A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, giving Freddy Krueger a burned face, a striped sweater and a glove fitted with blades, and casting a young Johnny Depp in his first film role. Twelve years later Craven returned with Scream, written by Kevin Williamson, in which teenagers who have seen every slasher film still get hunted by a figure in a Ghostface mask, and the genre was made to laugh at its own rules.

Not every landmark came from the slasher cycle. Stanley Kubrick adapted Stephen King's The Shining in 1980, sending Jack Nicholson and his screen family to spend a winter as caretakers of the Overlook Hotel, and King spent years complaining about the result. Clive Barker directed Hellraiser in 1987 from his own novella, built around a puzzle box called the Lament Configuration that summons the Cenobites and their leader, known to fans as Pinhead. In Japan, Hideo Nakata's Ringu of 1998 built its terror around a cursed videotape and a girl with long black hair crawling out of a television, and Gore Verbinski's American remake, The Ring, arrived in 2002 and started a run of Hollywood remakes of Asian horror.

The Blair Witch Project, released in 1999, presented itself as footage recovered from three student filmmakers who vanished in the Maryland woods, and a marketing campaign that treated the story as real made a tiny production enormously profitable. James Wan has been behind two of the biggest franchises of this century. Saw, which he made with the writer Leigh Whannell in 2004, introduced the Jigsaw killer and his elaborate traps, and The Conjuring in 2013 dramatised a case from the files of the paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, set in a Rhode Island farmhouse in 1971. Its spinoffs gave the Annabelle doll films of her own, although the real Annabelle kept by the Warrens is a Raggedy Ann doll rather than the porcelain figure on screen.

Steven Spielberg kept the great white shark in Jaws mostly off screen in 1975 because the mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce by the crew, kept breaking down in salt water, and the delay made the film far more frightening. Alfred Hitchcock shot the shower scene in Psycho in black and white with chocolate syrup standing in for blood, cut to Bernard Herrmann's stabbing strings. The questions here range across all of those decades and suit anyone who has spent a few October weekends with the lights off. Answers to every question are listed below the quiz.