We often hear that death is not the end — and that's especially true in movies.
Characters are shot, blown up, and beheaded — but death can be easily reversed for a sequel. For
proof, just check out these glorious returns from the unknown. But, be warned, spoilers lie ahead.
Ask a younger generation of movie buffs about character resurrection,
and a lot of them will think of eight words:
"So tell me, what's become of my ship?"
As Captain Hector Barbossa, Geoffrey Rush doesn't just go from dead to living,
but from evil to good as well. In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,
we learn that an Aztec treasure cursed him and his crew to walk the earth long
past their deaths, with their true nature as undead corpses revealed by moonlight.
He's finally released from the curse when missing coins are added to the stolen
treasure — just in time for Johnny Depp, as Captain Jack Sparrow, to shoot him dead.
But in the Pirates universe, there's more than one way to beat the reaper. After Jack himself dies in
the sequel, Dead Man's Chest, his crew goes to the shack of the mysterious Tia Dalma to hold a wake.
She reveals that she knows an experienced guide who can sail them through the seas
beyond the grave — and Barbossa walks down the stairs. Sure enough, he guides the crew to Davy
Jones' Locker in At World's End and brings Jack back with him. Despite his early death,
Barbossa ends up becoming the only primary character, besides Jack, to appear in every
installment of the series — until he gets killed all over again in Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Long before Barbossa bit the dust, one of the biggest deaths in fandom was
that of Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And it was an event
that had plenty of longtime fans thinking the exact same thing...
"Are you out of your Vulcan mind?"
In Star Trek II, Khan activates the Genesis device, a machine so powerful
it can reorganize an entire planet at the subatomic level.
Spock sacrifices himself and dies of radiation poisoning while repairing the ship so it can get
to safety. Of course, it was a heartbreaking moment for everyone, especially Kirk.
"Live long and prosper." Spock then gets a full funeral
with his coffin launched into space, which seems about as final a death as you could ask for.
Not so fast. In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,
we learn that Spock's body landed on the new planet formed by the Genesis device.
His consciousness, however, has been transferred to Dr. McCoy. So, the Enterprise crew has to
save Spock from the collapsing planet and reunite his mind and body. You won't be shocked to learn
that their mission was successful, bringing Spock fully back to life by the movie's end.
Alien 3 is one of the most divisive movies in the
series. But if there's one thing its detractors and defenders agree on:
it's a cruel, grim piece of work — the only disagreement is whether that's good or bad.
This mean streak carries to the end, when Ripley burns herself alive to destroy the alien gestating
inside her before an evil corporation can weaponize it. This ending feels like director
David Fincher's attempt to make sure both Ripley and the franchise were good and dead forever.
As we all know, that didn't work. Five years later,
Ripley was back — thanks to cloning in the appropriately-titled Alien: Resurrection.
"Hey."
"I thought you were dead."
"Yeah, I get that a lot."
But she isn't quite the Ripley we knew — her DNA has been combined with the creature's,
and Weaver's bug-eyed, emotionless performance feels truly alien.
Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet handles the resurrection with the same dark humor
and surreal touches he'd shown off in his earlier films, such as The City of Lost Children. A scene
in which Ripley discovers the grotesquely mangled clones who preceded her is particularly memorable.
There's definitely a cynical meta-joke to Ripley being brought back by greedy creeps
who refuse to let her die, just so they can squeeze more money out of her — but
how you feel about that probably depends on how you feel about the movie as a whole.
Whatever you might think of these explanations for characters' return
trips from the great beyond, at least they get an explanation. Not every character does:
Take Ezra Miller's character Credence Barebone from the Fantastic Beasts series.
In these Harry Potter prequels, Eddie Redmayne plays Newt Scamander, a magizoologist who arrives
in New York to discover it's being terrorized by a ball of dark energy called an Obscurus, which
is caused by repression of magical abilities. He eventually learns it's attached to Credence,
the adopted son of an anti-magic crusader. Newt confronts Credence in the subway tunnels and
tries to peacefully talk him down, but a bunch of American wizards barge in, wands blazing.
They don't just kill Credence — they obliterate him, leaving nothing behind but a cloud of debris.
Nevertheless, British Ministry of Magic officials inform Newt in The
Crimes of Grindelwald that Credence survived. And if you want to know how,
you're out of luck. It's all happening in a universe with magic, so naturally,
one can just throw their hands up and accept that "it's magic!" as an explanation. While
many questions linger — it seems unlikely that any answers will magically appear.
One of the most iconic resurrections in 21st-century cinema has to be Gandalf's,
as portrayed by Ian McKellen in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Gandalf doesn't just get a return, he gets an upgrade too:
He comes back with all the powers that had belonged to Saruman, before he lost them
by siding with Sauron. Once he was Gandalf the Grey, but now, he is Gandalf the White.
Director Peter Jackson plays up the drama to tremendous effect:
Gandalf's death scene, in which he bellows at the towering, demonic Balrog is unforgettable.
"You shall not pass."
Jackson also carefully filmed Gandalf's return to catch new Rings fans off guard,
as Legolas warns his companions that the White Wizard is approaching. Certain that he
means Saruman, they prepare for battle, and the audience is misdirected right along with them.
Then, a wizard appears with his face hidden by blinding light — only to resolve into Gandalf.
While many fans love character resurrections, just as many think they're terrible. For a recent
example, consider Emperor Palpatine's resurrection in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. In the
original trilogy, Palpatine first appears in The Empire Strikes Back as the shadowy
puppet master of the Galactic Empire before appearing in the flesh in Return of the Jedi.
Though he attempts to bring Luke Skywalker over to the Dark Side,
he is unsuccessful, and gets thrown down a shaft by Darth Vader for his trouble.
That seemed like the end of it — and it was, until the first Rise of Skywalker trailer
closed with Luke's words, "No one's ever really gone," and the Emperor's familiar, raspy laugh.
As the release date approached, fans waited expectantly to see how
he'd come back in a series that had mostly avoided reviving characters from the dead.
In the end, the only explanation we get amounts to: Somehow,
Palpatine survived and has returned. Many fans were, unsurprisingly, displeased.
But his return to the living didn't annoy fans as much as what he does when he gets there.
He reveals that he is Rey's grandfather — a twist so bizarre, many fans had predicted it
entirely as a joke. But, in the end, only some people found it amusing.
Unlike most characters on our list, this one had to wait many years and many movies before he made
his dramatic return. In Captain America: The First Avenger, the Red Skull is a Nazi officer whose
experiments gave him superhuman strength, but they also flayed the skin from his face. He uses
the mystical Tesseract to power his collection of space-age weapons, until Cap knocks it out of its
casing and the Red Skull tries to hold it in his bare hands, which seemingly disintegrates him.
A year later, in The Avengers, we learned that the Tesseract is actually the Space Stone, and that it
works by opening wormholes in space. Comics-savvy viewers immediately guessed that the Red Skull
hadn't been killed, just sent elsewhere. It took six years, but those guesses were confirmed in
Avengers: Infinity War, when the murderous Thanos arrives on the planet Vormir looking
for the Soul Stone. He's greeted by a hooded figure, who reveals a familiar red face. The Red
Skull explains that the Tesseract transported him there, and since he didn't love anything
or anyone enough to sacrifice to the Stone, he guides others to a treasure he can never possess.
No genre loves bringing characters back from the dead as much as slasher-horror does.
This tradition goes back all the way to 1978's Halloween, and its iconic villain,
Michael Myers. The classic flick leaves his death uncertain with a final scene that
reveals his corpse has disappeared after being shot multiple times. Sure enough, he's back to
kill again in Halloween 2, and later sequels find more and more outlandish ways to bring him back.
None of them, however, quite top his baffling return in Halloween: Resurrection.
The previous movie, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, ends with Laurie Strode straight-up
hacking Myers' head off so hard it rolls across the ground. How do you come back from that?
Well, according to Resurrection, that beheaded body isn't Michael at all.
"Oh, my god. She killed wrong person."
A flashback explains he switched clothes with a paramedic before Laurie caught up with him.
It works better than it has any right to — the fake-Michael grabs
at his mask at one point as if confused why he's wearing it.
But there are a lot of things this doesn't explain. For starters, why would the paramedic
lunge at Laurie as soon as he wakes up in the van? And why, through the whole thing,
but especially when Laurie's coming at him with an ax, does he never think to
just take the mask off to reveal that he's actually a middle-aged man with a moustache?
In the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger returns from the grave to
torment the children of the people who killed him. But the series is all about
finding new ways to make sure he stays dead for good — and none of them seem to work.
In Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Neil Gordon, the psychiatrist treating Freddy's current
round of victims, learns he can put the killer away for good by dousing his bones in holy water.
It seems like our long cinematic Nightmare is over — at least until Nightmare on Elm Street 4:
The Dream Master. As the film starts, a character dreams that his dog is taking a fiery leak, then a
pit opens up revealing Freddy's remains. His bones start reconnecting, his scarred flesh reforms,
even his signature hat is back — and that's all the explanation we get. Well, except for this…
"You shouldn't have buried me. I'm not dead."
Freddy's creator, Wes Craven, came up with a much more elegant solution when he returned to
the franchise in New Nightmare. Freddy's still dead — but he turns out to be much more than
just a fictional character. He's an ancient evil force, now free to enter our reality.
He targets original Nightmare star Heather Langenkamp and the rest of the cast and crew,
before Heather finally banishes him to the world of fiction once again.
Serial killer Charles Lee Ray first cheats death in Child's Play by using a voodoo ritual
he learned from an old accomplice, transferring his soul into a doll. The ending of this film
practically dares any sequel maker to find a way to bring Chucky back: He ends up burned to
a crisp. Then he has an arm, a leg, and his head shot off. Finally, he takes a bullet to the heart.
Yet bring him back they did. Child's Play 2 is the most inexplicable return in the series. It
opens with the Play Pals toy company cleaning up Chucky's severed head and
building a new doll around it. Why would they do this? According to a Play Pals executive,
it's to prove that no one at the factory tampered with the original voice cassettes,
which could have convinced Chucky's owner that he was evil. Of course,
none of this makes much sense. All that matters is that Chucky is back.
"I always come back."
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