Happy Halloween! The scary movie quiz

Everyone loves a scary movie - everyone. Admittedly some of you may not have realised it yet but, trust us, you'll see the light eventually. Just remember: don't go into the light...

Horror and thriller movies have become as much a part of Halloween as ghosts, witches, pumpkins, fancy dress and trick-or-treat. They go together like bread and butter, salt and vinegar, blood and gore, stalk and slash. Well, you get the picture.

Haunted history

The marriage of Halloween and celluloid creepiness is not surprising when we consider how long the medium has been around. In fact, the movie widely believed to be the first in the horror genre was made in 1896 by French director Georges Méliès. Le Manoir du diable (released in the USA as The Haunted Castle and in the UK as The Devil's Castle) ran for just three minutes. Despite its brevity, the film presaged several tropes that would become familiar to audiences, notably the transformation of a human into a bat.

The first films of Edgar Allan Poe's famous tales of the macabre were made in the 1900s and the first movie version of Frankenstein was made in 1910. Other well known tales of the weird and the supernatural were also adapted: film versions of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were just two among many that appeared in that decade.

In 1920, the broodingly atmospheric The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was released to wide acclaim. Two years later, Max Schreck appeared in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, now usually known as simply Nosferatu. This unauthorised adaptation of Stoker's seminal vampire tale was a genuine horror film; a century later, Schrek's interpretation of the undead Count Orlok is genuinely scary. Nosferatu, perhaps more than any movie that had so far appeared, set the template and the standard for a whole genre.

Small wonder then that a famous scene from Nosferatu was the inspiration for our own 2014 YouTube Halloween feature.

Perilous private plate fun

Our Halloween post last year featured some of our favourite creepy cars and trucks from the film and TV, and of course, their sinister number plates. This year we thought we'd bring you something a little more challenging.

Below we have compiled 20 collections of the most evil number plates currently available from Regtransfers. Each numbered group references a well known movie or TV show by representing key words or characters from the work in question. Your task is to identify as many of those horrific horror flicks as you can.

Have fun. Happy Halloween!

The guess-the-movie quiz

Answers

1. The Exorcist
2. The Shining
3. Alien
4. Psycho
5. Halloween
6. Jaws
7. An American Werewolf in London
8. Evil Dead
9. A Nightmare on Elm Street
10. Nosferatu
11. The Blair Witch Project
12. The Birds
13. Frankenstein
14. Dracula
15. The Wicker Man
16. The Ring
17. Scream
18. Phantasm
19. It
20. Friday the 13th