Once upon a time, Burbank was a sleepy Los Angeles suburb known chiefly as the butt of a running Laugh-In joke (every week announcer Gary Owens told us the show was coming from “beautiful downtown Burbank”). It had a reputation as a conservative bastion in the midst of the blue Southern California landscape, with its own police force and a lot of gun stores. Burbank has changed through the decades along with the rest of Southern California, but its changes have involved a lot more than massively escalating property values.
Burbank is now The Home of Horror.
Those in the know will recognize that slogan as belonging to Dark Delicacies, the venerable horror bookstore that likely started Burbank’s rise to horror-dom, back when it first occupied a storefront on Burbank Boulevard in 1994. Dark Delicacies later moved a few blocks south to Magnolia Blvd. and now resides around the corner on Hollywood Way. Within a mile of that spooky institution, horror shoppers will also find Halloween Town, Halloween Town Costumes, Bearded Lady Vintage & Oddities, The Mystic Museum, and Lucifer’s Pizza; also in the vicinity are collectibles shops like Be Kind Video (yes, really—a VHS store), Atomic Records, and Blast From the Past.
That latter venue, a paradise of monster-themed air fresheners and Funko Pop figures housed in a former Wilson’s Leather Outlet, is also host to one of L.A.’s most unique horror events: the (usually) monthly Dead Right Horror Trivia Night. This event, now in its 11th year, is one part typical bar trivia competition, one part schmoozefest, and one part party. Those who gather each month are a mix of fans, writers, and filmmakers; many have attended from the event’s beginning in 2013.There are often over a hundred players gathered together, about 80% male with a range of ages, most clad in black horror movie t-shirts.
Like the trivia nights held in bars everywhere, participants assemble in teams of four to six people. The event is organized in six rounds with eight to ten questions in each, and questions may be either simple answer (written down on index cards that are then collected and tallied) or multiple choice. Ties are resolved by lightning rounds, in which teams send their best player to the front in hopes they’ll be able to fire off correct answers before their opponents can. Teams can also “double down” in a round, betting that they answered all of the questions correctly for double points (and zero if they missed one). Horror soundtrack cues are played to mark the beginning and end of each round. After a particularly tough round, the music is accompanied by numerous groans. The teams have names like “Crystal Lake Swimming Instructors,” “Sutter Kane Bookclub,” “Macready’s Beard” (they’ve been around from the beginning) and “Legends of Boggy Creek” (the latter seem to be the team to beat).Many of the teams have slogans they shout out during the opening roll call (“Sadomasochists From Beyond the Grave” call in perfect unison, “Jesus wept!”). The teams vie for horror movie swag—think a Blu-Ray of The Last Amityville Movie signed by several of the cast and crew or an Exorcist: Believer color-changing mug—to say nothing of bragging rights. The event isn’t publicized beyond a Facebook page, so it has that enviable cachet of “you have to know someone to get in” (teams also must register in advance to participate, and each player must contribute one dollar, which goes to a dog rescue charity). Occasionally horror movie celebrities like Tom Holland or Barbara Crampton serve as guest hosts.
If you can’t immediately identify multiple titles related to both of those names, then Dead Right is probably not for you. The emphasis is completely on movies (literature need not apply), with questions drawing from classics, recent hits, grade-Z bombs, and television. The evening’s current hosts are screenwriter (Jackals, the Day of the Dead tv series) and podcaster Jared Rivet and Rebekah McKendry, a filmmaker (Glorious, All the Creatures Were Stirring) and cinema professor at USC who also lists executive positions at both Blumhouse and Fangoria on her resume. Together, McKendry and Rivet have hosted the event since 2015; before that, it was co-created by McKendry and another Blumhouse exec, Ryan Turek, in January 2013. Originally held at the now-vanished Jumpcut Café in Studio City, the event was an almost immediate hit (the early capacity crowds led to the need to register participants). Rivet was a player (on the team “Zombie Redneck Torture Family”) for the first two years. When Turek stepped down, Rivet replaced him, working alongside McKendry to craft the insanely difficult questions.
So how hard are the questions? McKendry noted, “We don’t pull any punches with the questions. We really do try to make them as hard as possible because we know that the people who are coming to this event know their stuff and we don’t just want to give them, ‘Name the four Ghostbusters’-style questions.”
In case you’re sitting there right now trying to remember the names of the Ghostbusters, here are a few sample questions for you to chew on: From a round titled “Remakes That Time Forgot,” Bijou Phillips played the lead in this 2009 remake of what 1970s Larry Cohen horror classic? And in case you didn’t get enough Bijou Phillips, the next question asked for the title of the 2007 movie she starred in that was a remake of a 1970 Herschell Gordon Lewis splatterfest (the answers, respectively, were It’s Alive and The Wizard of Gore). Another category demonstrated that expertise wasn’t confined only to films that have already been released: the round on “Films Coming Out in 2024” asked for the subtitle of the next Ghostbusters installment (it’s Frozen Empire), and which of the following—Smile, Terrifier, Paranormal Activity, or A Quiet Place—was not slated for a sequel in 2024 (Paranormal Activity). When two teams aced all of the questions, the lightning round asked the champions to name the director of the forthcoming Nosferatu remake (Robert Eggers).My personal favorite question on one of the nights I attend—because it’s one of the few I can actually answer—asks players to identify the 2003 South Korean film that was remade in 2009 as The Uninvited (Kim Jee-Woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters happens to be one of my favorite movies).
Although it lacks the liquor found in bar trivia nights (pizza, however, is present, with teams either bringing their own or ordering delivery), Dead Right has the convivial feel of a party where a lot of the attendees go way back. There’s even a multi-generational thing: McKendry, who notes that she was pregnant for the first Dead Right back in ’13, is usually joined by her 11-year-old daughter. Because there are typically between 15 and 20 teams, there’s a considerable amount of time required for judges to gather the written responses to each question and decide who won that round; this means the players have plenty of time for socializing and networking throughout the evening.
One regular player, writer Matt Stedman, recently held a script reading (for his feature screenplay A Very Krampus Christmas) using Dead Right’s location Blast From the Past as the venue, co-host Jared Rivet as the narrator, and an audience comprised in part of Dead Right attendees (the reading was announced through Dead Right’s Facebook page). It isn’t all just about networking for Stedman, though, who has been attending Dead Right for about ten years. “I’ve made a lot of friends there,” he told me, when I asked him about his favorite part of Dead Right, “and I like being part of a team that supports each other. Also, it’s fun for me to test my horror knowledge, though it’s often very humbling because some of these people know so much more than I do.” Stedman’s team, The Monster Squad, did manage to pull off one recent win, triumphing over the ever-reliable Legends of Boggy Creek. As Dead Right’s co-founder, Turek noted in a 2013 interview, “How about a good solid four hours of horror fans hanging out, interacting, and talking about the day, or talking about what’s going on in their lives, or talking about horror? It gets them out of the movie theater to talk and share their love outside of the convention circuit.”
Still, there’s an element of competition involved here, and even the more hardcore horror nerds may find themselves lost in an evening at Dead Right (I did, and I’ve written books on horror movies!). What is it that makes some of us better at this sort of thing, beyond simple differences in our ability to remember details? Jeopardy champion Tony Hightower has suggested that winning at trivia might be less about memory and more about understanding how the questions are asked. That makes some sense…in a generalized test of knowledge. But the players at Dead Right are being questioned on a single genre, which makes me wonder: do they watch horror in a different way from the rest of us? Where most who watch a horror movie are looking for a few chills before moving on, more serious horror fans will incorporate aspects of the genre into their lifestyle (in, say, their music or clothing choices). But is there a third category of horror movie watcher that not only watches everything within the genre (seriously—if you hear a question about Escape Room 2, how likely are you to have known there was an Escape Room 1?) but actually internalizes minute details of each horror film viewed? One study of those who excel at trivia found via brain imaging that they didn’t possess more brain cells but better connections between those brain cells. The same study postulated that perhaps their brains got better at building these connections the more deeply they delved into trivia. Other studies have suggested that trivia can also be good for the health of the participants: not only are players naturally better at trivia games related to subjects they have an interest in, but that interest and the game actually improve memory and brain health (as a 2017 study through the National Institute of Health put it, “trivia questions and their answers can be considered as cue-target pairs”). Trivia mainly exercises the frontal lobe, and its benefits increase as we age (although it also teaches younger people to use research resources and work on improving their memory).
So those horror nerds, with their black shirts and massive amounts of arcane knowledge, may not only be thinking more efficiently than the rest of us, they may be doing it longer. To paraphrase David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, “Long live the horror flesh (and brain).”
Ultimately, though, it comes down to the social event. Did I call it a party? Maybe I should’ve said, “family reunion” instead, because Dead Right really does possess that sense of one clan united by their (very detailed) love of horror. I asked co-host Rivet what was the most extraordinary thing he’d gotten out of Dead Right in the nine years he’d co-hosted it, and here’s what he said: “I have definitely met some incredibly talented people (including some of my idols!), gotten some writing gigs and acting jobs as a result of doing this every month, but above all of that, I have been in a happy, healthy relationship with the woman I love going on almost nine years now, and I can safely say that we 100% would not have gotten together were it not for trivia.”
The next time someone accuses you of having a head stuffed with useless (horror movie) knowledge, tell them that you’re not only likely to live longer, but you’ll end up with the best love relationship. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Burbank.
