"I want to play a game. Stab movie trivia. Three rounds. You call the cops, she dies. You get a question wrong, she dies."
— Ghostface, Scream (2022)
A person is given a chance to survive a life-or-death situation: answer a question.
It doesn't matter what the question is. It can be something trivial or deadly serious. Maybe it's asked by a Fair-Play Villain and gives the person a fair chance to survive. Or it's a rigged question and it doesn't matter what they say, or it doesn't have an answer, or it's a Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle, where the answer is not what a person would usually say. Usually a stripped-down version of the Absurdly High-Stakes Game, keeping the suspense without the theatre. If they know the stakes, it will probably be an Armor-Piercing Question, with which it can overlap if the questions have a particular emotional significance to the person being asked. It's a sister trope to Sadistic Choice.
Heads or Tails? may be exactly what the killer asks, but it doesn't need to be. That example is particularly common due to the binary nature and the element of random chance.
Riddle Me This is the trope for when the question is explicitly a riddle. This is just a question or multiple questions. It may have a trick answer - or, indeed, be unanswerable - but it's not a riddle.
In the right circumstances, it may overlap with Only Smart People May Pass. However, this is a supertrope, as the question being asked doesn't necessarily require smarts to answer (though it can do), and it may be that it ultimately doesn't matter what they say. In particularly cruel cases, expect the killer to be looking for the Metaphorically True answer.
Compare with These Questions Three..., which is a subtrope for when the character is explicitly asked three questions.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Higurashi: When They Cry: Takano threatens Satoko with a gun while asking her a question that has caused her trouble due to color blindness. She takes a complete guess, which turns out to be right. She still shoots her anyway.
Film — Live-Action
- The Batman (2022): The Riddler abducts district attorney Gil Colson and straps a bomb to his neck, threatening to detonate unless Colson can answer three questions. Batman helps Colson answer the first two, but Colson refuses to answer the third question — who gave the GCPD the information that led to a historic drug bust which ended Sal Maroni's operation. As a result, Colson is killed.
- In Cold Pursuit, as Nels is on his way to kill the next of Viking's henchmen, he's listening to a radio debate about who the greatest quarterback of all time was: John Elway or Peyton Manning. Nels chimes in with "Elway". Later, as the severely-beaten henchman begs for mercy, Nels starts to walk away only to suddenly turn and ask him the same question. The man replies "Elway" — and is killed anyway.
- Collateral: Vincent tells the client at the jazz club that he'll spare him if he can answer where Miles Davis learned music. The owner replies "Juilliard", which turns out to be true, but Vincent still executes him because Davis dropped out of Juilliard. Max points out that this is a cheat.
- Deconstructed in Exam. The applicants, all escaping a world of plague and rampant poverty, are told they only have to answer one question in order to get the job that could free them from it. The "life or death" stakes become more evident throughout the test, as people are increasingly driven to murder and torture. The question turns out to be the last question they were asked: "Any questions?" The right answer is "no".
- Played for Laughs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Bridge Keeper asks each of King Arthur's knights in turn These Questions Three..., and if they get one wrong, they get magically thrown off the bridge. The questions vary from absurdly easy ("What is your name?") to absurdly hard ("What is the capital of Assyria?"), and the quality of the Knights' responses also varies. He then asks King Arthur "What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" Arthur responds "What do you mean? An African or a European Swallow?". This single question proves the Bridge Keeper's undoing, as he doesn't know.
- Scream:
- Scream (1996) is the Trope Codifier. In the taunting phone call between Casey and Ghostface, Ghostface threatens to kill Casey and her boyfriend Steve unless Casey can name the killer in Friday the 13th (1980). She cuts him off to reply "Jason". Ghostface replies that Jason isn't the killer until Friday the 13th Part 2 and subsequently disembowels Steve in front of her. He then follows it up by asking Casey if he is at the front door or the patio door. She responds by escaping through another set of doors instead, which turns out to be the correct decision since there are actually two Ghostfaces at Casey's house, one guarding the front door and the other guarding the patio door. When out of costume, Billy and Stu tell Sidney that they're going to ask her a life-or-death question, but they don't get around to it since she fights back.
- Scream 4: In a homage to Casey Becker's death scene, Ghostface ties up Charlie and asks Kirby several questions about horror movie remakes, which she gets right. It doesn't matter, since Charlie is Ghostface this time.
- Scream (2022): In the opening scene, Tara gets asked to answer questions for her and her best friend Amber's life—this time, about the Film Within a Film, the Stab movies. She cheats by looking up the answer online, but still can't answer all of them and gets stabbed. She manages to survive, although badly injured, and Amber was the killer, so she was never in any danger.
Literature
- In Daniel Hawthorne novel A Line to Kill, Le Mesurier is given the choice of calling a coin toss to save his life. But because the killers were seeking revenge for a death due to gambling debts, they were going to kill him regardless.
- No Country for Old Men: The Psycho for Hire Anton Chigurh gives some of his victims a chance to survive if they can call a coin toss. One calls him out on it, saying it's just a way for him to pretend he's not responsible for his own actions.
- You (Kepnes):
- Joe gives Benji a test about his favorite books (which he failed because he still lied about them). He then gives him a taste test with his soda water brand, to see if he can tell the difference. Joe claims that he's willing to let Benji go, but he's fooling himself, and he kills Benji anyway (although he does fail the quizzes).
- When Beck has found out at the end of the novel that Joe is stalking her, he kidnaps her and holds her captive in the basement of the bookstore. He then learns that she was cheating on him with Dr Nicky, at which point he subjects her to a quiz to prove that she's in love with him and over Nicky. She manages to convince him that she is, but she tries to escape later and he kills her.
Live-Action Television
- In the Midsomer Murders episode "Death of the Small Coppers", the killer of the week attempts to pose one to DS Winter, by asking him the riddle of the two guards. He ends up giving the correct answer (with the assistance of several bystanders), only for the killer to not stick to his end of the bargain. DS Winter gets saved in the nick of time by one of the bystanders, nevertheless.
- In Scratch N' Sniff's Den of Doom , this element is played during the first 2 rounds and the final round. When a contestant is on the Drop Zone, they have to answer a "Question Impossible" to avoid falling into the Cooking Pot of Peril. However, most of them get it wrong resulting in them getting dropped. In the final round, the Killer Question, the contestant has to stand on a chosen drop zone to answer a question. After a process of elimination, if the drop zone the contestant on is right, they win, if wrong, then they are dropped into the Cooking Pot of Peril.
- Swarm: Dre asks everyone, "Who's your favorite artist?" If they say something other than Ni'Jah, she attacks them, and almost always kills them.
Music
- The band Flyleaf references such a question in their song "Cassie". The song is named for and references the death of Cassie Bernall, a victim of the Columbine Massacre. It was reported that one of the killers asked if she believed in God, and shot her upon her saying "Yes". (This was ultimately proven to have happened, but not to Cassie Bernall.)
Video Games
- In Darksiders, War is pinning down Tiamat of the Chosen and preparing to pull out her heart. Tiamat Ain't Too Proud to Beg, and promises to grant War's every wish. When War asks her, "Can you restore the Balance?" she instead gives an Evil Laugh. War pulls out her heart.
Web Animation
- In the third and final installment of Eric "cboyardee" Shumaker's Dilbert parody series, the title character runs into Alice while Going Postal and threatens to kill her unless she can answer one question: which came first, ranch or cool ranch? Alice answers ranch, to which Dilbert responds by shooting her while cursing her out.
- Homestar Runner: At the end of "The House That Gave Sucky Treats", Strong Sad claims to have visited a house while trick or treating where a bunch of hooded figures asked him "questions about life and existence", threatening "eternal damnation" if he got them wrong and offering Twizzlers if he got them right.
Webcomics
- Goblins: The goblins face an angel
in a Pocket Dimension who asks each of them a deeply personal question, warning that a correct answer means freedom (and a level up) and a wrong answer means death. However, three of them answer incorrectly but escape anyway, and the fourth picks the right answer at random before he even hears his question.
