Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
47 free Twilight Zone trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free Twilight Zone trivia questions with answers. This Twilight Zone trivia quiz travels through the original 1959-1964 CBS series and everything it spawned. It covers Rod Serling — his war service, his fights with sponsors, the pilot that got the show made and the share he sold to CBS — and the classic episodes everyone half-remembers: Henry Bemis and his broken glasses, the Kanamits' cookbook, William Shatner's gremlin, Talky Tina, Anthony Fremont's cornfield, Maple Street's monsters and the bandaged face in Eye of the Beholder. It also reaches the 1983 movie and its on-set tragedy, the 1985, 2002 and Jordan Peele revivals, and Disney's Tower of Terror. Early questions suit anyone who has caught a New Year's marathon; later ones reward fans who know which composer wrote the famous guitar theme and which season was stretched to an hour. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which network did The Twilight Zone originally air from 1959 to 1964?
CBS
CBS aired the series from October 1959 to June 1964; the network had wanted a rating of at least 21, and early numbers fell short.
Q 02How many seasons did the original series run?
Five
Five seasons ran from October 1959 to June 1964, and the final two were marketed simply as Twilight Zone, without the 'The'.
Q 03How many episodes of the original series were made?
156
Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson between them wrote 127 of them.
Q 04Which actor plays the book-loving Henry Bemis in 'Time Enough at Last'?
Burgess Meredith
Burgess Meredith played Henry Bemis; he returned to the series in 'The Obsolete Man' as a librarian sentenced to death by the state.
Q 05In 'To Serve Man', what does the alien book of that title turn out to be?
A cookbook
The book is a cookbook: the nine-foot aliens had promised to end hunger and war on Earth, and were fattening humans up to eat them.
Q 06What is the name of the towering alien race in 'To Serve Man'?
Kanamits
The aliens are the Kanamits; Richard Kiel, later Jaws in the Bond films, played the visiting Kanamit.
Q 07In 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet', William Shatner's character sees a creature doing what?
Sabotaging the plane's wing
Bob Wilson sees a gremlin sabotaging the plane's wing, tearing at an engine cowling; nobody else sees it until the torn cowling is found after landing.
Q 08Which future Superman director directed 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet'?
Richard Donner
Richard Donner directed it, the first of six Twilight Zone episodes he made, all in the fifth season; he went on to direct Superman in 1978.
Q 09In The Twilight Zone's 'Living Doll', what is the name of the wind-up talking doll that torments Telly Savalas's character?
Talky Tina
Talky Tina was voiced by June Foray, who was also the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and of the real Chatty Cathy doll.
Q 10In 'It's a Good Life', where does six-year-old Anthony Fremont send people who displease him?
The cornfield
Anthony wishes them 'into the cornfield'. Billy Mumy played the six-year-old whose powers have cut the town off from the rest of the world.
Q 11In 'It's a Good Life', in which fictional town has the rest of the world disappeared?
Peaksville, Ohio
The town is Peaksville, Ohio; the episode came from Jerome Bixby's 1953 short story, which Serling adapted.
Q 12In The Twilight Zone's 'Eye of the Beholder', what do the hospital doctors and nurses look like when finally revealed?
Pig-snouted, twisted humanoids
Pig-snouted, twisted humanoids surround a patient, Janet Tyler, who is beautiful by our standards; two actresses played her, one bandaged, one unmasked.
Q 13In The Twilight Zone's 'The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street', what first sets off the neighbours' spiral into paranoia?
Q 21What was the title of the very first episode, broadcast on October 2, 1959?
Where Is Everybody?
'Where Is Everybody?' opened the series on October 2, 1959, with Earl Holliman alone in a deserted town; season two's opener 'King Nine Will Not Return' reworked the same idea.
Q 22Which composer wrote the famous dissonant guitar-and-bongo theme introduced in season two?
Marius Constant
Marius Constant, a Romanian-born French avant-garde composer, wrote the cues as stock library music for CBS; two of them were spliced together as the theme from season two.
Q 23Which composer wrote the original season-one theme, later replaced?
Bernard Herrmann
A power outage
A power outage kills the stoves, cars, phones and even portable radios; the twist reveals aliens on a hill who simply flicked the lights to let the humans destroy themselves.
Q 14In the episode about Nan Adams' cross-country drive, what does she finally realise about herself?
She has been dead since the accident
The hitchhiker who keeps reappearing along her cross-country drive is Death, waiting patiently for her to catch on.
Q 15In 'The Invaders', the tiny spacemen menacing Agnes Moorehead's farm woman turn out to be from where?
Earth
The 'invaders' are astronauts from Earth; Agnes Moorehead never speaks, and the only dialogue is the astronaut's radio warning about a planet of giants.
Q 16In 'Nick of Time', William Shatner becomes obsessed with what in a small-town diner?
A penny fortune-telling machine
The penny fortune-telling machine, a 'Mystic Seer' napkin holder in a Ridgeview, Ohio diner, answers yes-or-no questions; Shatner's Don Carter cannot stop feeding it pennies.
Q 17In 'A Stop at Willoughby', where does the exhausted commuter find himself when his train stops?
A deserted 19th-century railway car
Gart Williams wakes in a deserted 19th-century railway car, stopped in sunshine at peaceful Willoughby; Serling called it his favourite story of the first season.
Q 18In 'Kick the Can', residents of which retirement home discover the secret of youth?
Sunnyvale Rest
The home is Sunnyvale Rest; George Clayton Johnson wrote the 1962 episode, which was remade as a segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983.
Q 19In 'The Midnight Sun', what does Norma believe is happening to the Earth?
It is falling into the Sun
Norma believes Earth is falling into the Sun as the heat climbs; the twist reveals the sweltering scenes as a fever dream, and the planet is really drifting away from the Sun and freezing.
Q 20Who directed 'The Masks', the only woman to direct an episode of the original series?
Ida Lupino
Ida Lupino directed 'The Masks' in 1964; she had also acted in the season-one episode 'The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine', making her the only person to both act in and direct the original series.
Herrmann, of Psycho and Vertigo fame, also scored seven episodes including the pilot.
Q 24What was the plot of the 1957 pilot pitch 'The Time Element'?
A man trying to warn Honolulu of Pearl Harbor
William Bendix played a man who dreams he is in 1941 Honolulu, trying to warn of the Pearl Harbor attack; CBS shelved it until Desilu Playhouse aired it in 1958, and its success got The Twilight Zone made.
Q 25Which legendary filmmaker did CBS reportedly offer the hosting job to when the show struggled in season one?
Orson Welles
He turned it down, and the network reversed course and expanded Serling's on-camera role instead.
Q 26Which run of the show was expanded to hour-long episodes?
The fourth
The fourth season, January to May 1963, ran hour-long episodes: CBS had dropped the show from its fall 1962 schedule, then brought it back mid-season to fill an hour slot.
Q 27What did Rod Serling do with his ownership share of the show after it ended?
Sold it to CBS
Serling sold his share of the show to CBS; he did not foresee syndication and missed out on the royalties that followed.
Q 28What was the creator's later anthology series, which debuted in 1969?
Night Gallery
Night Gallery, hosted by Serling, began with a 1969 TV-movie pilot and ran as a series from 1970 to 1973.
Q 29In which upstate New York city did the show's creator spend most of his youth?
Binghamton
Serling grew up in Binghamton, whose park carousel inspired 'Walking Distance'; he was born in Syracuse and later taught at Ithaca College until his death in 1975.
Q 30Which teleplay won Rod Serling his first Emmy, in 1956?
Patterns
'Patterns', a Kraft Television Theatre drama about a boardroom power struggle, won Serling the 1956 Emmy for original teleplay writing and made his name overnight.