DIE ANOTHER DAY
‘Dead’ villains who make the ultimate comeback in sequels…
DRACULA
Drowned in an icy moat at the end
of Dracula: Prince Of Darkness
(1966), Christopher Lee’s Count
is revived in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968). How? A priest trying to exorcise Drac’s castle stumbles and hits his head in a thunderstorm, with a trickle of blood finding its way to Dracula’s lips. To the undead, a drop of the red stuff is the elixir of life.
JASON VOORHEES
We hear of Jason’s death, as a boy, in Friday The 13th (1980), only for his rotten corpse to rear up from Crystal Lake. Adult Jason then becomes the franchise’s antagonist, but is killed with a machete in fourth instalment The Final Chapter (1984). He’s resurrected in Jason Lives
(1986) when his corpse is dug up and impaled with a metal pole that’s struck by lightning. He’s alive!
THE RED SKULL
In Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), the Nazi officer with a flayed face is done for by the Tesseract when he tries to grasp it with his bare hands. But… A-ha! In Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Thanos bumps into ol’ claret-chops on the planet Volmir while looking for the Soul Stone. He didn’t die after all! The Tesseract transported him through a wormhole in space!
DOCTOR OCTOPUS
And Green Goblin, and Electro… All killed in previous Spider-Man movies, they’re pulled from their universes, pre-popping of respective clogs, to fight it out with not one, not two, but three incarnations of Spidey (Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire) in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). It’s easy to bring back the dead if you have the multiverse at your disposal.
EMPEROR PALPATINE
“Somehow, Palpatine returned,” says space pilot Poe Dameron in The Rise Of Skywalker (2019), and that was deemed enough to allow the filmmakers to resurrect Ian McDiarmid’s Big Bad nearly 40 years after Darth Vader chucked him down a bottomless pit in Return Of The Jedi (1983). Apparently he survived by transferring his consciousness to a clone on planet Exegol. Or something.