Pontypool Changes Everything Trivia Quiz

Answer: Drama

Les Reardon, on his property in Pontypool, receives a phone call in his truck from someone from his high school stating that the kids want to do a horror story for their annual theatrical production and not the work he had been planning. While receiving this call, he finds a hunter on his property and decides to investigate as he has had hunters killing deer there once before. When he reaches the man, he is attacked with a rifle and the man flees into the forest, hitting many of the trees along the way. Les recovers and chases after him only to discover the man dead on a frozen pond nearby, his face half destroyed.
Les is taken to the police station for questioning and the Detective on duty, Det. Peterson, takes it upon himself to get the basics down. He sends Les on his way shortly after.
Les goes directly to school to tell Mary, the principal, what happened. His overembellished story of the murderous account persuades her to get the school nurse, but she finds the nurse's body in her room, its mouth having been torn off. She rushes to the office and takes Les out the back of the school to escape but they are stopped by the killer and Les is knocked out by a fall. He wakes up to find Mary next to him in the gym and he decides to take her to the hospital. He soon realizes he is in pursuit of Detective Peterson, but Mary, now dead, opens the car door and falls out to the road. This causes Peterson to crash his car into a ditch while Les turns onto Highway 35.

Answer: Ellen

Les soon turns onto Highway 7 and cleans up his car with fresh snow. Realizing that he has nothing to worry about as he has only done what a normal person would do in his situation, he turns down a sideroad to call for help at a nearby house. When he stops though, he discovers that the house's residents are also exhibiting the same tendencies as the killer. They chase him across the property before he jumps into the semi-frozen Lake Scugog and fiercely paddles through the freezing-cold waters to a boat dock. Now chilled to the bone, he lays in the boat and waits.
Detective Peterson returns home with a rental car and discovers that he finds it difficult to form coherent sentences. Although they make sense in his mind, he can't form the words outwardly. His wife, Ellen, gladly receives him when he gets home and he comforts her when she needs it before they go to bed. Eventually though, the Detective receives a phone call from the police station and an officer decides to come out to help, but when he arrives, Ellen discovers that her husband has changed. He attacks the man at the door, biting into his lips and breaking both of their necks. This doesn't bring him down though; Ellen is forced to kill her husband to save herself from his rage.
Les wakes up in the boat and makes his way to a house owned by an elderly couple. He finds it difficult to walk, but they welcome him over. They barely have time to react before he knocks them both out.

Answer: Parkdale

Les comes across more people on his drive down to Parkdale in Toronto. Some of them are zombies and he has no choice but to put an end to them to protect himself, but he realizes that more and more are safe. When he makes his way downtown, he finally finds infected people who are promptly attacked by the military, but once they begin to speak, their contagion spreads across the city within an hour, latching onto the minds of everyone in contact. Les arrives at Helen's house shortly before her new husband returns.

When Les realizes that Helen has become a drug dealer, he kills her new husband in self-defense and finds Helen dead in the bedroom. He takes his young son and leaves. Ellen finds herself in the middle of the street in Pontypool, frightened at what she's done.

A man named Steve finds her and invites her into his car to take her to the doctor's office (which is already overfilled with dead patients), but he stops along the way and is promptly attacked by infected citizens. Ellen hides in the forest near a small lake.

Answer: Dilaudid

Les continues northbound from Toronto until he gets back past Gravenhurst and he realizes he simply needs to get his son, whom he names Ernie, to stop screaming. Remembering what was left in the medicine cabinet at Helen's house, he stops at a pharmacy, brings his gun, dons a Halloween mask, and stops at the counter to demand the store's entire supply of Dilaudid, which the pharmacist obliges to give to him.

He gives the baby half a tablet and takes one and a half himself. Driving along the highway, he considers the life that could have been with Helen and Ernie, but he is soon stopped by the OPP and the officer takes him to the station as a result of the stolen vehicle, kidnapping, robbery, and murder.

While he waits in the station for an hour though, the officer disappears and the place remains empty. Les takes his things and Ernie and leaves, heading back to the sideroad where he knocked out the elderly couple.

He arrives here as the man inside attempts to attack him, reaching to bite at his mouth like the rest of the zombies. Luckily, Les is able to start the propeller of a boat on Lake Scugog and save himself.

He and Ernie head to an island.

Answer: Doctor Mendez

Ellen Peterson waits at the small lake for an indefinite amount of time. Soon though, figures start appearing in and around the water, asking obscure questions she has trouble answering and attacking each other violently. She continues to ask more and more and she slowly makes her way deeper and deeper into the lake.
Twelve years earlier, you're in Vancouver, addicted to drugs. One day, you go to the hospital feeling pain in your arm and you are asked if you've been to a detox clinic. As it turns out, you've been banned from all clinics in the province, so they send you to a psychiatric hospital. It's here where you meet H/ellen and begin to ween yourself off the drugs. It takes twelve years to get to where you are now.
In Pontypool, the doctor Ellen was about to visit, Doctor Mendez, continues to examine corpses in his office. It is now one week after the outbreak has died down. He later goes to a makeshift morgue in the high school where Les once worked. Four thousand bodies are spread through the gymnasium, halls, and classrooms. Mendez examines Les Reardon's corpse; he died of smoke inhalation. Having crossed Scugog and found a barricaded settlement on an island there, Reardon waited on a small peninsula with his son, but instead of safety, a suicidal community on the island nearby had picked the moment to take their lives, setting off an explosion that killed Les where he sat. Mendez places Les' body into the girl's change room to be transported to an incinerator. His assistants watch outside as a military truck carries away dead bodies, including that of Ellen Peterson, shot in the head as a precaution. They pack up for the day and head home in tears.

Answer: Big Town TV

The virus has been spreading from the dawn of life. First, the infected exhibit slight abnormal behaviors such as swollen tongue, despondence, and depression. After a while though, they would take on a symptom known as Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis (AMPS). This usually involves cannibalistic traits, but the infected person attacks another's face, eating away at their flesh before whipping back and breaking both the victim's and the infected's necks. In this stage of the disease, peoples' speech becomes abnormal, and soon they feel that their only escape from this psychological shift is through the unafflicted mouths of another.
On Queen Street, Greg walks past Big Town TV, commonly viewed by infected people. Over the past week, he has been told that he too is infected and it's merely an inevitability before he becomes (essentially) brainless. Grant Mazzy, the reporter on Big Town TV, warns that it is now an offense to avoid showing up for regularly scheduled check-ups for those with AMPS under penalty of imprisonment. Otherwise, gangs of people have been going further north to escape the disease.
Julie and Jimmy, a brother and sister, spend time at a lake. Jimmy realizes that his father is slowly letting himself get infected, and for three days, he hasn't been talking.

Answer: A virus

Grant Mazzy, who returns home from work at Big Town TV, begins doing his charity work for the Parkdale Crisis Hotline by taking calls from those who need anonymous help. When he takes his second caller, he finds a crisis awaiting him. An eleven year old boy named Warren asks him for advice and he gets kind assistance from the TV personality. On Big Town TV, Grant interviews Dr. Rauf regarding the AMPS virus and he is told that while AMPS is enigmatic in its construct and form, it is a manifestation of something laying hidden beyond the structure of human language in its many forms.

As a paradigm shift is formed, the victim rapidly progresses to phases of higher hypersensitivity before they become too dangerous. Grant asks the doctor how the disease spreads to which he replies that it becomes borne in connotative language and metalanguage.

Answer: The Higher Power

Grant Mazzy hires Greg on as a volunteer at Big Town TV and while Greg's 'Higher Power' is not a fan of any of this, he is somewhat powerless to stop Greg from making his own choices. Greg places the job on a different pedestal from his disease. Though he knows AMPS lurks inside him, he refuses to let it interfere and he often forgets about it when the job is remembered.

When Greg visits a church addiction group later that night, he discusses his problems with others and departs. On his way out though, Greg finds two people behind a dumpster; one of these is killing the other, using their face as a straw to suck out the insides. Greg is clearly shaken as both people are killed with a quick snap of their necks.

The following day, Grant instructs Greg to drive north with him to get a first-hand view of the virus for television. Though Greg is a bit worried, he follows along. Julie and Jimmy remain at home. News of their neighbours being killed by those with the virus has spread and they're worried. Jimmy continues to not talk and his parents now do the same. Julie tells stories. One day, a man drives up to their house and they find that their parents have transformed into these 'creatures'. Both parents chase each other into the lake and fight to attack each others' mouths.

Their father catches sight of Julie and soon they are pursued into the woods. While Julie and Jimmy hide in a tree, their parents kill each other below, snapping their necks during their rage. The children flee.

Answer: Grant

Jimmy and Julie flee through the woods from the cannibals around them, inevitably finding their way to a shack in the woods. Living off raspberries from the nearby forest, they begin to settle in and survive.
Grant and Greg arrive in Pontypool, a location which, according to Grant, changes everything. Here, Grant states that the cannibals have wiped out the town, but before this it was used as a dumping ground for bodies from various mob and gang groups as well as government organizations. One particular shack in the woods was notorious for use by all of these groups with no connection to one another. They drive there.
When Grant arrives at the shack, Greg waits at a nearby picnic table. Grant enters and is immediately attacked by Jimmy and Julie who have holed up inside for protection. They make quick use of him with a knife and place his body into a freezer for food and preservation. Greg doesn't notice a thing. Getting up from the picnic table, he departs with his Higher Power, who follows him into the forest. Inevitably, the disease never manifests itself in Greg. Instead, he dies of starvation, fading away near Pontypool. Greg's Higher Power finds his way to the road and expects salvation, but instead he's picked up in a truck.

Answer: False

Jimmy and Julie continue to live off the zombie meat, falling in love as brother and sister in a time of survival. Jimmy continues to go mute while the two of them trap and kill zombies near their safehouse. Eventually, Julie becomes pregnant and time passes before she finally gives birth in the cabin.

When the baby is born, the two are shocked as it walks on its hind legs and flees into the forest. The commotion attracts two nearby hunters out to bag a few zombies. When they come across the cabin, both Jimmy and Julie try to protect themselves, but the hunters use their guns in self-defense and kill the two. As time progresses people continue to be killed and kill each other.

The disease continues to spread, but is confined to Ontario; two thirds of the population are killed either through disease or the preventative measures used against it.

Many cities north of Toronto are devoid of population. For the most of the duration after the outbreak, people are advised not to speak or use body language, restricting daily 'talk' to nods and head shakes. Eventually, the zombies are eradicated.