- On page 441 of Salman Rushdie's 1988 book The Satanic Verses, the character Chamcha quotes a line from Pale Fire: “My Darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.”
- The 1996 The X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" features a creature named "Lord Kinbote". Nabokov is the favorite author of the episode's writer Darin Morgan.
- In the 2017 movie Blade Runner 2049, the device performing a "Post-Trauma Baseline Test" on Ryan Gosling's character, "K", quotes lines 703–707 of the poem.[72] A copy of the book is also shown in K's apartment, and in another scene where K is being queried about his memories by Lieutenant Joshi. Shade's misinterpretations of the reality of the afterlife have been compared to K's misinterpretations about his character. Additionally, in another scene Ana de Armas's character "Joi" holds up the book suggesting "K" to read something to her. "[73][74]
- In the 2018 movie Unsane, the main character claims Pale Fire as her favorite book.
- Kate Elizabeth Russell's My Dark Vanessa (2020) refers to Pale Fire, specifically lines 269–274, when Vanessa's teacher/abuser shows this stanza to her, calling her "my dark Vanessa" as in Shade's poem.
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