How to use these
Thirty questions in four rounds: where Halloween comes from, the monsters and the books that made them, the films and series, and a closing round of numbers and oddities that works as a tiebreak. Read them out one at a time with a twenty-second answer window, or type them into a community quiz so everyone answers on their own phone in costume and the score keeps itself.
The first round is the one to keep if you have children in the room; the film round assumes an audience old enough to have seen a horror film. Where an answer is folklore rather than fact — what kills a werewolf, what a vampire cannot do — the question says "according to legend", because a quiz that treats folklore as fact is asking to be argued with.
Round one: origins and traditions
1. Which ancient Celtic festival is Halloween most commonly traced back to? Samhain, marking the end of the harvest and the start of the dark half of the year. It was believed to be the night when the boundary between the living and the dead was thinnest.
2. What does the word "Halloween" actually mean? "All Hallows' Eve" — the evening before All Hallows' Day, better known as All Saints' Day, on 1 November. The contraction appears in Scottish writing from the sixteenth century.
3. In which countries did people first carve lanterns for the night, and from which vegetable? Ireland and Scotland, from turnips. Pumpkins came later, with emigrants to North America, where the pumpkin was cheaper, bigger and far easier to carve.
4. What is a carved pumpkin with a light inside called? A jack-o'-lantern — named, in Irish folklore, after Stingy Jack, a man who tricked the devil and was condemned to wander the earth with a burning coal in a hollowed turnip.
5. What did children in Ireland and Scotland do that later became trick-or-treating? "Guising": going door to door in disguise and performing a song or a rhyme in return for food. The phrase "trick or treat" itself first appeared in print in Canada, in 1927.
6. Which two colours are traditionally associated with Halloween? Orange and black — orange for the harvest and the autumn leaves, black for the dark and the dead.
7. Which Mexican holiday on 1 and 2 November honours deceased relatives with altars, marigolds and sugar skulls? Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It is not a Mexican Halloween: it is a celebration of the dead as guests, and it is far older than the costumes.
8. What is the name for an irrational fear of Halloween? Samhainophobia — from Samhain, the same root as the festival.
Round two: monsters and legends
9. Who wrote the novel "Dracula", and when was it published? Bram Stoker, an Irish author, in 1897. He never visited Transylvania; the setting came from books in the British Museum.
10. Which fifteenth-century ruler is usually named as an inspiration for Dracula? Vlad III of Wallachia, known as Vlad the Impaler, whose father was a member of the Order of the Dragon — "Dracul" in Romanian.
11. Who wrote "Frankenstein"? Mary Shelley. She began it at eighteen, during a rainy summer on Lake Geneva in 1816 when Lord Byron challenged his guests to each write a ghost story, and published it in 1818.
12. In Shelley's novel, what is the name of the monster? It has no name. Frankenstein is Victor Frankenstein, the student who builds it — a distinction that has been settling arguments for two hundred years.
13. According to legend, which metal is said to kill a werewolf? Silver. The silver bullet is a nineteenth-century addition; older stories offered no cure at all.
14. What is a group of witches called? A coven. The idea that a coven has exactly thirteen members comes from a 1921 book by Margaret Murray, not from any older tradition.
15. According to folklore, what can a vampire not see? Its own reflection. Bram Stoker made it a plot point in "Dracula"; the older explanation was that mirrors showed the soul, and a vampire had none.
16. Which 1820 story by Washington Irving features a headless horseman? "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". The village of Sleepy Hollow is real — it is in New York State, and it changed its name from North Tarrytown in 1996 to match the story.
Round three: films and series
17. Which 1978 film by John Carpenter introduced the masked killer Michael Myers? "Halloween". It was made for about three hundred thousand dollars, and the mask is a Captain Kirk mask painted white.
18. In which 1993 stop-motion film does Jack Skellington, the king of Halloween Town, discover Christmas? "The Nightmare Before Christmas". Tim Burton wrote the story and produced it; the director was Henry Selick.
19. Which 1984 comedy about four scientists catching ghosts in New York has a theme song that asks "Who you gonna call?" "Ghostbusters". The song, by Ray Parker Jr., was nominated for an Oscar.
20. What are the three Sanderson sisters in "Hocus Pocus"? Witches, hanged in Salem in 1693 and brought back three hundred years later by a boy lighting a candle. The film was a flop in 1993 and became a Halloween tradition on television.
21. Which Stephen King novel about a haunted hotel did Stanley Kubrick film in 1980? "The Shining". King disliked the adaptation so much that he wrote his own television version in 1997.
22. Which 1973 film about a possessed girl was the first horror film ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar? "The Exorcist". It was nominated for ten and won two, for sound and for the adapted screenplay.
23. Which Netflix series set in the town of Hawkins, Indiana, features a parallel dimension called the Upside Down? "Stranger Things", first released in 2016. The town is fictional; the series is filmed mostly in Georgia.
24. What is the name of the van in "Scooby-Doo"? The Mystery Machine. The series began in 1969, and the monster has turned out to be a person in a mask in almost every episode since.
Round four: numbers and oddities
25. Roughly how much did the heaviest pumpkin ever weighed come to? More than 1,200 kilograms. The record, set in 2023 in the United States, stands at 1,246.9 kilograms — about the weight of a small car.
26. How many legs does a spider have? Eight — which is what separates spiders from insects, which have six. The fear of spiders is arachnophobia.
27. What is a baby bat called? A pup. Most bats have one pup a year, and a mother can find her own among thousands in a cave by its call.
28. In which 1966 animated special does Linus spend the whole night in a pumpkin patch waiting? "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". He is still waiting; the Great Pumpkin has never appeared.
29. In which decade did the phrase "trick or treat" first appear in print? The 1920s — in 1927, in a newspaper in Blackie, Alberta, Canada, describing children demanding treats and threatening pranks.
30. Which vegetable was carved in Ireland before the pumpkin took over? The turnip. A turnip lantern is harder to carve, smaller and considerably more frightening, which is arguably the point.
Running it on the night
A Halloween party is not a quiz night, so keep it short: two rounds, a break, two rounds, and the tiebreak from the last section. Twenty minutes is enough. If half the room is in costume and holding a drink, reading questions aloud works better than phones — unless you want the score to keep itself, in which case put the thirty into a community quiz beforehand and share the code.
For a mixed group with children, use rounds one and four and drop the rest. For a group that has seen every horror film ever made, round three is the one to make harder: ask for the year, the director, or the line.
Try it now
Make a room in 30 seconds and send the code to your friends.