Dracula Trivia
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This Dracula trivia quiz has 94 free questions with answers and spans the whole legend, from the book to the screen to the pop-culture Counts. It starts with Bram Stoker's 1897 novel - its letters-and-diaries structure, the ship Demeter, Whitby, Renfield's flies, Van Helsing's garlic and the working title Stoker abandoned at the last minute - and the real history behind the name: Vlad the Impaler, the Order of the Dragon and why Bran Castle's Dracula connection is mostly marketing. From there it moves to the movies: the unauthorised 1922 Nosferatu that a court ordered destroyed, Bela Lugosi's 1931 Universal classic and its Spanish-language twin, Christopher Lee's fanged, colour Hammer Dracula, Coppola's Oscar-winning 1992 version, plus Sesame Street's Count von Count and Hotel Transylvania. About a third of the questions are easy warm-ups; the rest will test even a lifelong horror fan. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 94 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Dracula appeared in 1897, late in which British monarch's reign?
Victoria
Victoria was in her Diamond Jubilee year when Dracula appeared in May 1897, and the novel pits its ancient Count against the era's newest tools: typewriters, phonographs and blood transfusions.
Q 02Bram Stoker was born in which country?
Ireland
Ireland: Stoker was born at Clontarf in 1847 and could not stand or walk until he was seven, yet he grew into an outstanding athlete and footballer at university.
Q 03What was Dracula titled on the printer's typescript before a last-minute change?
The Un-Dead
The Un-Dead heads the printer's typescript, changed to Dracula at the last minute; the typescript then vanished for decades until it was found in a barn in Pennsylvania in the early 1980s.
Q 04A footnote Stoker copied from an 1820 history told him the name 'Dracula' meant what?
Devil
Devil was the meaning given in William Wilkinson's 1820 history; its footnote said the name went to anyone conspicuous for courage, cruel actions or cunning.
Q 05In the novel, what is the name of the ship that carries Dracula and his boxes of earth to England?
The Demeter
The Demeter, a Russian schooner out of Varna, runs aground in a storm with its dead captain lashed to the wheel and a large dog leaping ashore.
Q 06In which English seaside town does Dracula come ashore?
Whitby
Whitby is the North Yorkshire port where Stoker holidayed in 1890 and is thought to have found, in the public library, the history book that gave him the name Dracula.
Q 07How is the novel Dracula structured?
Letters, diaries and clippings
Dracula is an epistolary novel told through letters, diaries and clippings, plus phonograph entries and a ship's log, so no single narrator sees the whole story.
Q 08In which city does Mina's fiancé end up delirious in hospital after escaping Dracula's castle?
Budapest
Mina's fiancé is found in the Hospital of St Joseph and Ste Mary in Budapest; she travels there to nurse him and they marry before going home.
Q 09What does Dracula's asylum patient Renfield feed the flies he collects to?
Spiders
Renfield feeds his flies to spiders, then the spiders to sparrows, hoping to absorb their lives; Dr Seward records the zoophagous habit in his phonograph diary.
Q 10Professor Abraham Van Helsing is from which country?
Holland
Van Helsing is from Holland; Dr Seward's old teacher practises in Amsterdam, speaks broken English, and brings consecrated wafers with him to fight the vampire.
Q 11In the novel, Dracula claims descent from which famous conqueror?
Attila the Hun
Dracula names Attila the Hun among his Székely ancestors, boasting to his guest that no one was ever so great as Attila, 'whose blood is in these veins'.
Q 12Which of these features does Stoker give Dracula in the novel?
Hair on his palms
Hair on his palms is among the oddities Harker notes at the castle, where the Count is an old man with a long white moustache; months later Harker sees him in London, grown young again.
Q 13In Stoker's novel, what effect does sunlight have on Dracula?
It weakens him but is not fatal
Q 21According to historian Radu Florescu, in which Transylvanian town was Vlad the Impaler born?
Sighișoara
Florescu placed Vlad's birth in Sighișoara, where his father kept a residence in the 1430s; Vlad and his younger brother Radu were later held hostage by the Ottomans.
Q 22Bran Castle, marketed to tourists as 'Dracula's Castle', was built in 1377 by whom?
Local Saxons
Local Saxons from Brașov built Bran Castle in 1377 under a royal privilege from Louis I; there is no evidence Stoker ever heard of it.
Q 23What did a court order after Florence Stoker sued the makers of Nosferatu for copyright infringement?
All copies destroyed
In the novel sunlight's effect on Dracula is that it weakens him but is not fatal: he walks London by day, and the fatal-sunlight rule came from the 1922 film Nosferatu.
Q 14Which actor-manager, Stoker's employer at the Lyceum Theatre, is often said to have partly inspired Dracula?
Henry Irving
Henry Irving befriended Stoker after a favourable review of his Hamlet and in 1878 hired him to run the Lyceum, a post Stoker held for 27 years, until the actor's death.
Q 15Stoker's wife Florence Balcombe had previously been courted by which famous writer?
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was upset by her choice, but Stoker, who had known him since their student days, kept up the acquaintance and visited him on the Continent after his release from prison.
Q 16Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 vampire novella, an acknowledged influence on Dracula, was called what?
Carmilla
Carmilla, serialised 1871–72, features a female vampire who preys on a lonely young woman and can take the form of a large black cat.
Q 17The 1901 Icelandic Dracula proved to be adapted from 'Mörkrets makter', a newspaper serial from which country?
Sweden
Sweden's serial began in June 1899 and ran almost twice as long as Stoker's novel; scholars took the Icelandic text for Stoker's own work, a translation or an early draft, until the Swedish serial resurfaced in 2017.
Q 18Vlad the Impaler was probably born in Transylvania but ruled which neighbouring principality in three separate reigns?
Wallachia
Wallachia was Vlad's realm in 1448, 1456–1462 and 1476; his first reign lasted two months before a rival retook the throne, and his last ended when he was killed in battle.
Q 19Vlad the Impaler's father took his nickname from which chivalric order, joined in 1431?
Dragon
Vlad II was inducted into the Order of the Dragon in 1431 by Sigismund of Luxemburg, who founded it to defend Christendom against the Ottomans; 'Dracula' means son of Dracul.
Q 20Which Ottoman sultan did Vlad try to kill in a night attack near Târgoviște in June 1462?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, invaded in 1462 after Vlad had his envoys impaled; the night raid never reached the sultan, who marched on to find thousands of impaled prisoners outside the capital.
A German court ruled for Florence Stoker in July 1925 and ordered all copies destroyed, but prints had already gone abroad, so the film she never saw outlived the order.
Q 24Who directed the 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampyre, starring Klaus Kinski?
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog directed Klaus Kinski as the Count and Isabelle Adjani as Lucy, and made the film in two versions, the actors speaking German in one and English in the other.
Q 25Universal's 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, was based directly on what?
A 1924 stage play
A 1924 stage play by Hamilton Deane, revised for Broadway by John L. Balderston, is what the film adapted; Lugosi had starred in it there from 1927, while he was still mastering English.
Q 26The 1931 Dracula's sets were reused at night to shoot a simultaneous version in which language?
Spanish
Spanish: director George Melford studied the day unit's English-language footage before composing his own shots at night, and his Drácula, with Carlos Villarías as the Count, runs almost half an hour longer.
Q 27The music over the opening credits of the 1931 Dracula is an excerpt from which ballet?
Swan Lake
The credits play Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake; the film has no original score, and Universal reused the same excerpt over the titles of The Mummy in 1932.
Q 28Bela Lugosi's birthplace, Lugos, was in Hungary when he was born in 1882; which country is it in today?
Romania
Romania: Lugos is now Lugoj, in the country's west, so the screen's most famous Dracula was born in the Count's modern homeland; he left in 1919, forced out for his part in an actors' union during a failed revolution.
Q 29Bela Lugosi was buried wearing what?
His Dracula cape and costume
His Dracula cape and costume went into the grave with Lugosi in 1956; his son has said that he and his mother made the choice, believing it was what the actor would have wanted.
Q 30Which notorious director gave Lugosi late low-budget roles, including a posthumous cameo in Plan 9 from Outer Space?
Ed Wood
Ed Wood cast Lugosi in Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster, then built Plan 9 around silent footage shot before the actor died in 1956, with a body double filling in for the rest.