Frankenstein Trivia
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107 free Frankenstein trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
52 free Frankenstein trivia questions with answers. Frankenstein is two stories at once: the 1818 novel a teenage Mary Shelley dreamed up during a rainy summer on Lake Geneva, and the flat-headed, bolt-necked monster that James Whale and Boris Karloff gave the world in 1931. This quiz covers both, plus the Bride, the Hammer films, Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Guillermo del Toro. The easy questions ask who wrote the book, who played the monster and what the villagers burn down. The harder ones get into the novel itself: where Victor studies, what the Creature reads, who Walton is, and why the 1831 edition is not quite the same book as the 1818 one. Expect a few surprises about how much of the 'Frankenstein' everyone pictures was invented by the movies. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the novel, its author and the individual films, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 107 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the subtitle of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein?
The Modern Prometheus
The Modern Prometheus: in Greek myth the Titan stole fire for mankind and, in some tellings, moulded the first humans from clay, as Victor shapes his Creature.
Q 02In what year was Frankenstein first published?
1818
Frankenstein was first published in 1818: the three-volume first edition appeared anonymously in London on 1 January of that year.
Q 03How old was the author when the novel was published?
20
Mary Shelley was 20 when Frankenstein was published; born 30 August 1797, she had begun the story at 18 during the summer of 1816.
Q 04In which English city did Mary Shelley lodge while writing much of Frankenstein?
Bath
Bath: the couple moved there in September 1816 to keep her stepsister's pregnancy secret, and Mary worked on the novel there before finishing it at Marlow in 1817.
Q 05Who suggested that the group at Villa Diodati each write a ghost story?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron: 'We will each write a ghost story,' he said, but he and the other poet present soon gave up theirs, while Mary took days to find the idea that became Frankenstein.
Q 06Which volcano's eruption caused the sunless summer of 1816 that kept Mary Shelley indoors writing Frankenstein?
Mount Tambora
Mount Tambora: its April 1815 eruption in Indonesia, the most powerful in recorded history, dimmed the sun and brought failed harvests and famine across the Northern Hemisphere in 1816.
Q 07Villa Diodati, where the story was conceived, overlooks which body of water?
Lake Geneva
Villa Diodati stands at Cologny on the shore of Lake Geneva; the poet hosting the party rented it for the summer of 1816.
Q 08Which book of German ghost stories, read aloud in French, entertained the Villa Diodati party before Frankenstein was begun?
Fantasmagoriana
Fantasmagoriana: its tales, such as a ghostly ancestor whose kiss doomed the younger sons of his house, prompted the party's ghost-story contest that produced Frankenstein.
Q 09Which landmark horror tale grew out of the same 1816 Villa Diodati gathering as Frankenstein?
The Vampyre
The Vampyre: John Polidori built it on a fragment his host had abandoned, and it was first printed under that host's far better-known name.
Q 10Which part of Frankenstein did Mary Shelley say was written entirely by her husband?
The preface
The preface: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote it in the author's voice, and one early reviewer took the whole novel for his.
Q 11Which pioneering feminist writer was the mother of Frankenstein's author and died days after her birth?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after the birth; her grave in St Pancras churchyard is where her daughter, at 16, secretly met and declared her love to the poet she later married.
Q 12Which philosopher and novelist was the father of Frankenstein's author, and the man the novel is dedicated to?
William Godwin
William Godwin welcomed a young poet as his disciple, then banished him from the house on learning that the married man loved his 16-year-old daughter; the pair ran away together.
Q 13At which university does Victor Frankenstein study and build the Creature?
Ingolstadt
Q 21Which detail of the Creature's creation did the 1931 film Frankenstein add to Mary Shelley's vague account?
A jolt of electricity
A jolt of electricity: in the novel Victor says only that he gathered 'the instruments of life' to 'infuse a spark of being', with no lightning or machines described.
Q 22In the original 1818 text of Frankenstein, Elizabeth Lavenza is which relation of Victor's?
His cousin
His cousin: she is the daughter of his father's sister in 1818, but the 1831 revision cut the blood tie, making her a nobleman's orphan adopted from a peasant family.
Q 23Which novelist praised Frankenstein in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine as an 'extraordinary tale'?
Walter Scott
Ingolstadt: at the Bavarian university Professor Waldman's chemistry lectures set Victor on the path to the secret of life.
Q 14The Frankenstein family belongs to which city, where much of the novel takes place?
Geneva
Geneva: hurrying home after his young brother's murder, Victor finds the city gates shut for the night and, in a flash of lightning, glimpses the Creature outside the walls.
Q 15Which epic poem does the Creature find and read, later comparing himself to its fallen angel?
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost: the Creature reads Milton's poem 'as a true history' and tells Victor, 'I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel.'
Q 16Where does the Creature confront Victor Frankenstein, tell his story and ask for a mate?
On the Mer de Glace
On the Mer de Glace: Victor has climbed to the glacier above Chamonix alone for solace when the Creature bounds toward him over the ice 'with superhuman speed'.
Q 17Where does Victor Frankenstein build, then destroy, a female companion for the Creature?
The Orkney Islands
The Orkney Islands: in a two-room hut on one of the remotest, Victor tears the half-made female apart, fearing the pair would breed 'a race of devils'.
Q 18Which of Victor Frankenstein's family does the Creature strangle at an inn at Evian?
His bride Elizabeth
His bride Elizabeth: warned 'I shall be with you on your wedding-night', Victor assumes he is the target and leaves her alone in their room, where the Creature strangles her.
Q 19Who is the ship's captain whose letters to his sister frame the story of Frankenstein?
Robert Walton
Robert Walton, bound for the North Pole, takes the dying Victor aboard from the ice, writes down his tale and is the last person to face the Creature.
Q 20What does the Creature vow to do after his maker dies at the end of Frankenstein?
Burn himself on a pyre
Burn himself on a pyre: he will 'consume to ashes this miserable frame' so that no one can learn from his remains how to make another, and is then carried off on an ice raft.
Walter Scott found 'uncommon powers of poetic imagination' in it, but his review named the wrong author, crediting the novel to the real writer's poet husband.
Q 24Seeing the 1823 stage version of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote that she found herself what?
Famous
Famous: the play, Presumption, was such a hit that it prompted a second edition of the novel.
Q 25The writer Brian Aldiss argued that Frankenstein was the first true work of which genre?
Science fiction
Science fiction: Aldiss, who made the case in his history Billion Year Spree, stressed that Victor 'makes a deliberate decision' and turns to laboratory experiment rather than magic.
Q 26Who directed the 1931 film Frankenstein?
James Whale
James Whale, an English stage director who came to Hollywood to film his hit Journey's End, took the project over from Robert Florey and went on to make Bride of Frankenstein.
Q 27Who played the Monster in the 1931 film Frankenstein?
Boris Karloff
Boris Karloff, then a little-known character actor: the opening credits listed the Monster's player only as '?', and his name appeared in the cast list at the end.
Q 28Which actor plays the title scientist in the 1931 film Frankenstein?
Colin Clive
Colin Clive got his break when Laurence Olivier gave up the lead in the war play Journey's End; its director then cast him in the 1930 film version and as Frankenstein.
Q 29Which studio produced the 1931 film Frankenstein?
Universal
Universal made it under Carl Laemmle Jr.: the profit from Dracula earlier in 1931 persuaded the studio to put more horror films into production.
Q 30Often misremembered as Igor, the hunchbacked assistant in the 1931 film Frankenstein is actually called what?
Fritz
Fritz, played by Dwight Frye: the name Ygor arrived only with Son of Frankenstein in 1939, for a broken-necked blacksmith who is no laboratory assistant.