10 Movies Where The Hero Was Dead All Along

hello All of You Beautiful People Jules here for whatculture.com and you know what in our cinematic present it's fair to say that the they were all dead all along long plot twist is totally and utterly played out but in some rare examples this Trope can still manage to shock and surprise so let's take a look at them today as I'm Jules this is whatculture.com and these are 10 movies where the hero was dead all along number 10 Jacob's Ladder Jacob's Ladder opens with the titular protagonist serving in the Vietnam War when dur during a sudden attack he's stabbed with a Bayonet by an enemy combatant after this jacob wakes up in the New York City subway apparently several years later for the rest of the movie Jacob encounters a series of increasingly unsettling demonic Visions seeming to suggest that he's suffering the effects of PTSD since returning from war but it's ultimately revealed that Jacob never actually made it back from Vietnam and the movies events have in fact been his brain making sense of everything that's happening to him as he dies as it turns out Jacob was stabbed to death by one of his own teammates after their squad was dosed with an experimental drug called the ladder causing them to violently turn on one another the final scene Cuts back to Vietnam where Jacob lies dead in a medical tent though in his final moments he at least seems to have found some fleeting sense of Peace regarding his young son's death a vision of whom leads him to the bright light as he dies number nine source code Duncan Jones's source code is one of the smartest and original Sci-Fi movies of the last decade following Captain couter Stevens as he repeatedly enters a computer simulation of a train bombing to try and track down the culprit yet it's revealed later on in the film that Stevens was effectively killed in action 2 months prior in Afghanistan and the US Army has been keeping his brain artificially alive on life support hooking him up to neural sensors which allow him to enter the simulation though Steven sees himself as an able-bodied man this is actually just a manifestation of his mind created in order to cope with the situation while in fact little of his actual physical body remains an unsurprisingly angry Stevens then asks Captain Goodwin to terminate his life support once he completes his mission but of course the film instead ends with Stevens hijacking some poor guy's body in a parallel Dimension instead yikes number eight the others so the others is presented as a pretty typical or bit terrifically crafted Haunted House story with Mother Grace and her two children living in a remote country house which appears to be occupied by malevolent Supernatural forces but the film's big reveal is that Grace and her children were actually the dead ones the entire time after a bereaved despairing Grace smothered her kids to death with a pillow and then committed suicide and in an added devilishly subversive twist the others are actually the new living occupants of the house on reflection it's certainly a stretch to call Grace a hero once we know the full extent of her actions far away from the initial suggestion that she was a fiercely protective mother hellbent on keeping her children safe from the ghosts in inhabiting their home number seven last Christmas the seasonal schmolz Fest known as last Christmas follows Kate a downtrodden retail worker whose life has turned around after a chance encounter with a handsome charming stranger known as Tom yet Tom is ultimately a bit too perfect to the point that it's actually quite suspicious which nevertheless does little to quell the shock factor of the film's big twist that Tom has actually been dead the entire time more to the point Tom was killed the year prior in a traffic accident and Kate who was herself deathly ill at the time received his heart via a transplant and so the film becomes a quite literal adaptation of the Wham classic last Christmas and so Kate has been seeing either a hallucination of Tom or indeed his Spirit depending on your perspective with the film sensibly never confirming his presence one way or another as much as romcoms rarely feature true heroes and as completely insane as the film's twist is Tom's tragic death nevertheless gave life to another person and that is def itely heroic number six stay Mark Foster's 2005 psychological Thriller stay opens with the sight of protagonist Henry sat on the Brooklyn Bridge next to a flaming car with no further context immediately given the movie has a slippery dreamlike logic to it both narratively and Visually as Dr Sam Foster tries to talk a suicidal despondent Harry out of killing himself but the film ends with the reveal that the increasingly surreal events featuring Henry Sam and Sam's girlfriend Leela are actually Henry's dying dream as he bleeds out from the aftermath of the aforementioned car accident on the Brooklyn Bridge the various characters that he encounters throughout the film are actually those who witnessed the crash with Sam and Leela attempting to save his life following the accident sadly Henry dies in the film's final moments as much as stay received widely polarized reviews from critics upon release it has won itself a cult following in more recent years due to its David Lynch inspired style number five Carnival of Souls releasing Lally decades before most of these movies Carnival of Souls is often credited with originating the Dead all along Trope with the film's very first scene depicting a car accident which sends Mary and her Pals plunging off a bridge into the river below inexplicably Mary seems to escape her watery grave and returns to shore while the police are dragging the lake and searching for bodies it's important to remember of course that this film was released in 1962 almost 40 years before the big twist became a cliche in its own right and so audiences were willing to accept what they were seeing was the truth throughout the film Mary finds herself increasingly haunted by troubling Visions especially a ghoulish man and a pavilion which she seems unavoidably drawn to Mary's Journey ends with her meeting her own ghoulish self at this Pavilion being chased by an army of ghouls and then finally collapsing on the beach in the final scene it's revealed that the corpses of Mary and her friends have been discovered inside the car in the river and yes she was dead the entire time number four Safe Haven not all movies with dead heroes are any good at all but this 2013 adaptation makes such bizarre use of the Dead all along twist that it really just begs to be seen Safe Haven is a pretty typical Sparks romantic drama for the most part focused on a troubled woman Katie who crosses paths with a dreamy widower known as Alex which leads to a rather steamy love affair but their romance wouldn't be complete without an extra piece of the puzzle the approval of Alex's dead wife Carly but how does the movie achieve this you ask well by giving Katie a friend Joe who in the film's twist ending is actually revealed to be the ghost of kie and was effectively trying to bring Alex and Katie together over the course of the movie even leaving Alex an encouraging letter to give to Katie before she died it's completely insane and yet with the film's own Twisted logic Kari basically ensures the cute couple get their happy if rather demented ending number three point blank John borman's 1967 crime classic point blank revolves around anti-hero protagonist Walker who in the film's opening sequence is betrayed in the middle of a heist left for dead and deprived of his $93,000 share of the loot at the hands of his partner reys but Walker appears to recover and spends the rest of the film on a roaring Rampage of Revenge that is if you ignore the popular fan theory that Walker actually died from his injuries in the opening scene and the rest of the story was nothing more than the desperate Vengeance fueled dream of a dying man this would actually explain the film's radically non linear storytelling but a fan theory is one thing and certainly wouldn't Merit inclusion on this list by itself if not for the fact that Borman himself actually confirm the theory to be completely true suddenly The film's Surreal aesthetic makes all the more sense we're witnessing Walker sinaps is firing off wildly as he shuffles off his mortal coil number two the sixth sense it may not be the earliest instance of this Trope but ight shamalan the Sixth Sense is unquestionably the most famous film to feature a protagonist who was dead the enti time and prompted a host of inferior Thrillers to rehash the same twist in the years that followed our hero is Malcolm Crow a child psychologist who is shot and wounded by a former patient in one of the film's establishing scenes but Malcolm seemingly makes a full recovery with the story picking up the next year as he works with Cole a young boy who can indeed see dead people Jaws are collectively dropped at the end of the movie then when it's revealed that Malcolm himself was in fact dead the entire time having died from the IAL gunshot wound thankfully with Cole's help Malcolm is able to deliver some parting words to his wife Anna and begin to move on his business now complete and number one Pale Rider Clint Eastwood's legendary 1975 Western Pale Rider sees Eastwood playing a character known only as the preacher a shadowy gunslinger who helps protect a prospecting town from a mining Tycoon and whose precise identity is kept intentionally vague the film's biblically inclined title of course suggests right off the bat that the preacher might well be the personification of death as per a famous bible quote and I looked and behold a Pale Horse and his name that sat upon him was death and Hell Followed With Him there are more overt hints throughout that the preacher isn't quite of this world namely Marshall stockburn literally referring to him as dead at one point and Eastward himself eventually confirmed the theories in an interview that the preacher is indeed an out andout ghost audiences are ultimately still free to believe whatever they want given that the film itself didn't explicitly out the preacher as a ghost but Eastwood himself has certainly made his film making intention pretty clear

Channel: WhatCulture

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Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2024