1. Vincente Minnelli’s classic 1944 musical Meet Me In St Louis follows the Smith family across the course of the year. In the ‘Fall’ vignette, Tootie (Margaret O’Brien) and Agnes (Joan Carroll) head out for Halloween. What curse does the tough kid dressed as a bearded lady threaten Tootie with if she doesn’t agree to “kill” a neighbour by throwing flour at them?

   1. The headless horseman will cut your head off

   2. The banshees will haunt you forever

   3. The pumpkin man will kidnap you in the night

   4. The lady in the lake will visit you in your dreams

2. 

   Supernatural horror movie Poltergeist was released in June 1982, but then reissued on October 29th the same year to capitalise on the Halloween holiday weekend. The film (a sly critique of suburbia and consumerism) concerns the misadventures of the Freeling family after they move into a new house. What evergreen horror trope did the film employ?

   1. Evil spirits attack the family because teen daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne) loses her virginity

   2. The house was built on top of an old cemetery

   3. After everyone dies, little Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) is the “final girl”

   4. The family experience a “bat scare” when bats fly out of the basement

3. The forgettable 2011 TV movie The Dog Who Saved Halloween features a talking dog (voiced by Joey Lawrence) who encounters a scary neighbour during the spooky season. Which legendary movie scary guy played said neighbour?

   1. Robert Englund

   2. Nick Castle

   3. Lance Henriksen

   4. Brad Dourif

4. The Simpsons’ ‘Treehouse Of Horror’ Halloween special tradition began in 1990 with the episode of the same name. In the segment ‘Bad Dream House’, the Simpsons move into a suspiciously cheap old house that turns out to be fostering an evil spirit a la The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist. Which legendary actor provided the unusually mellifluous voice of the removal man who mutters “I’m glad there’s a curse on this place” after Homer tips him $1?

   1. Vincent Price

   2. James Earl Jones

   3. Jeremy Irons

   4. Morgan Freeman

5. What hot new product from Bob’s (Sean Astin) Radio Shack store do the boys take with them on their trick or treating adventure in the Stranger Things 2 episode ‘Chapter Two: Trick Or Treat, Freak’?

   1. A Walkman

   2. A camcorder

   3. Realistic CB radio walkie talkies

   4. A Polaroid camera

6. 

   Scream queens Jamie Lee Curtis and her mother Janet Leigh have co-starred in two horror movies. What were they?

   1. Halloween and Psycho

   2. Halloween: H20 and The Fog

   3. The Fog and Halloween: Resurrection

   4. The Fog and Halloween

7. In 2004’s Mean Girls, nobody tells Cady (Lindsay Lohan) that the party dress code reflects the fact that “Halloween is the one day a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything else about it." What does Cady come to the Halloween party dressed as?

   1. A zombie doctor

   2. A zombie bride

   3. A zombie president

   4. A zombie cheerleader

8. In Kathryn Bigelow’s immortal 1991 bromance Point Break, Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) and his fellow surfing outlaws rob banks while wearing Halloween rubber masks of which notable figures?

   1. Classic Movie Monsters

   2. Wartime British Prime Ministers

   3. The Marx Brothers

   4. Former US Presidents

9. 

   True or false: in 2001’s 20th anniversary edition of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg dubbed the film so that instead of mum Mary (Dee Wallace) telling big brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) he can’t go as “a terrorist” for Halloween, she tells him he’s not going as “a hippie”?

   1. True

   2. False

10. Judd Apatow and Paul Feig’s cruelly-axed series Freaks & Geeks features a heartbreaking Halloween episode, ‘Tricks and Treats’, in which Sam (John Francis Daley) and the geeks go trick or treating, only to be accidentally egged by Lindsay (Linda Cardellini) and the freaks. Sam goes as Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still, Neal (Samm Levine) as Groucho Marx. Who does Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) dress as?

    1. Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde

    2. Lindsay Wagner in The Bionic Woman

    3. Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels

    4. Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin

Solutions

1:B - But it wasn’t the Halloween sequence that star Judy Garland (who played elder sister Esther) was worried would traumatise kids. Garland rejected the original lyrics to the musical's breakout hit ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ — which ran "It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past" — as too depressing., 2:B - It was a shift from the regrettable ‘built on an ancient Indian burial ground’ trope of the 1970s, at least. In fact, despite pop culture misremembering Poltergeist as playing into that trope, one character specifically notes ‘it’s not an ancient tribal burial ground’. Take that, Family Guy!, 3:C - Henriksen, who played Bishop in Aliens and Ed Harley in Pumpkinhead, has also starred in plenty of B-movies. In an interview with Horror Channel, he freely admitted to taking many roles in order to pay the bills. “I’m responsible for my work but not for the thing as a whole and we all have to work,” he said. “If you were a knife sharpener guy with one of those wheels you have to spin to sharpen knives for people, you don’t know what they’re going to do with it. They could cut the turkey or kill your neighbour.”, 4:B - Jones also narrated ‘The Raven’ and played alien Serak The Preparer in the same episode. In order to give an authentically droolly performance as the hungry alien, Jones ate cookies while recording his lines., 5:B - The Halloween episode features so many nostalgic 1980s references that it’s a lot even by Stranger Things standards: the boys dress as Ghostbusters, Nancy and Steve go to a party dressed as Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay in Risky Business, and Max dresses as Michael Myers from the Halloween movies., 6:B - In 2020, Curtis received a special Scream Queen MTV Movie & TV Award, accepting it alongside Michael “The Shape” Myers from Halloween. "For me the greatest partnership and the only reason I'm standing here today, is my partnership with Michael, so I'd like to bring him out," Curtis said in her acceptance video. "Everybody Michael Myers, my friend and often foe. Don't worry we both had Covid tests and he's wearing a mask — the greatest ever.”, 7:B - “An ‘ex’ wife!” Jonathan Bennett, who played Aaron, told Cosmopolitan in 2019 that the Mean Girls cast have now become Halloween costumes themselves. “It’s not just a movie to some people, it’s part of their life,” he said. “It’s part of their life, they speak it, quote it, dress up like the characters for Halloween. How many times as an actor do we get the honour of being in something that is that gripping to the audience?” Very fetch., 8:D - Of all the “Ex Presidents” gang, only two were actually real-life surfers: Bojesse Christopher, who played Grommet/LBJ, and John Philbin, who played Nathanial/Jimmy Carter. To this day, Ex Presidents masks remain a hot ticket item at Halloween costume stores., 9:A - He also used CGI to augment E.T., and replaced the guns carried by government agents with walkie talkies. His decision was lampooned by South Park in the 2002 episode ‘Free Hat’, in which the boys feud with Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola over their re-releases of classic films that feature guns replaced with walkie talkies, and key cast members replaced with Ewoks. Ten years later, Spielberg admitted he regretted the decision to tinker with his film, telling a screening audience “I was disappointed in myself.”, 10:B - Feig told Vulture in 2015 that only Starr could have played the iconic Bill. “There’s this kind of religious moment you have when someone walks in the room and is right for the part. When Martin Starr came in, there was no question in my mind that he was Bill.”

Scores

1. 9 and above.

   Your pumpkins are carved. Your candy bowl is set. Your fake blood recipe is unmatched. (For the record: supermarket brand chocolate topping, red and yellow food dye, red cordial; mix to desired consistency, i.e. arterial, dried, scabby...) Forget the Twelve Days of Christmas, you’re all about the 31 days of Halloween. The spooky season is your favourite time of the year, and you watch Halloween-themed movies and TV all month long.

2. 7 and above.

   You might not be the type to attend a midnight screening of the latest slasher flick when October rolls around, but you’re quietly pleased that Australia is embracing the Halloween spirit with increasing gusto. This year, you’ll have some fun-sized chocs ready “just in case” (which means you plan to eat them all while watching your favourite spooky movies).

3. 4 and above.

   You don’t trick or treat, but you have a soft spot for the Halloween memories of your youth, be they Elliot and Michael trick or treating in E.T. or Tootie as “the most horrible” in Meet Me In St Louis (even though you know it’s really a Christmas movie). You’re partial to the occasional horror movie, but nothing too scary.

4. 0 and above.

   Not only have you never been trick or treating, you think that Halloween is “an American invention” and avoid all mention of it in popular culture. You’re aware of the existence of the Halloween franchise, but you couldn’t tell the difference between Freaks & Geeks and Stranger Things if your bucket of candy depended on it.