Back from the dead for a sequel

Cafe Society
1

Somewhat inspired by the thread What is the WORST immediate sequel to a great film?: You may recall Hallowe’en Resurrection, an (inferior) sequel to the (not-great) Hallowe’en H20. Michael Myers being decapitated in H20 didn’t stop them from making the sequel – oh, they decapitated the wrong guy! Easy-peasy.

It made me think of Whoopi Goldberg’s line in Soapdish when Kevin Kline wants back into his soap opera role, and Whoopi reminds him that his character was killed off:

a tractor trailer came along and decapitated him. You know what that means? It means he doesn’t have a head. How am I supposed to write for a guy who doesn’t have a head?

Rob Zombie tried to kill off his antiheros in The Devil’s Rejects – they die in a hail of bullets in a police ambush – but (one supposes) by popular demand, they somehow come back in 3 From Hell. (Alas, real life was less kind; one of the 3, Sid Haig, passed away during the filming.)

So: Any other examples of a sequel where a main character is killed off at the end of one movie, only to be brought back in the sequel?

2

Does it have to be an immediate sequel?

“Somehow, Palpatine returned!”

3

It seems to me that Dr. Malcolm from Jurassic Park is the poster boy for this kind of thing.

4

Ardath Bey in the Brendan Fraser mummy movies.

Jeff Goldblum’s character in the Jurassic Park movies.

Dracula in the Hammer Films movies with Christopher Lee.

Doctor Frankenstein in several of the Hammer Films movies with Peter Cushing.

5

For that matter, Frankenstein’s monster in the Universal movies, and Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, in the Universal monster movies.

6

It wasn’t at the end, but Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez was killed in Highlander and inexplicably returned in Highlander II because of plot magic.

7

Nah, any old time.

8

Pretty much all the slasher series. Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, etc.

9

Ian didn’t die in the movie though, just the book.

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Shredder returned for the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie despite having been crushed by a trash compactor at the end of the first one.

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Along the same lines, Darth Maul was cut in half and fell down an endless chute in The Phantom Menace, and managed to come back for Solo.

T’was just a scratch.

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Gandalf the Grey. Dies fighting the Balrog, comes back as Gandalf the White.

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Pretty sure this trope was invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who sent Sherlock Holmes to his death over a waterfall with Moriarty, in a story that was titled The Final Problem.

Turns out that it wasn’t as final as expected…

14

Yes, exactly.

I noticed that no one has given Hammond/Attenborough as an example and it was the same for him (dead in book, alive in film).

15

Doesn’t quite fit the OP since it’s a book series, but literary James Bond was killed off at the end of From Russia With Love, then brought back by Fleming for Dr No.

16

Ripley in the Alien series of films didn’t let dying stop her returning.

TCMF-2L

17

In the Worst Immediate Sequel thread I mentioned Arthur 2 On the Rocks.
Hobson (John Gielgud) died in the first movie and was in the second movie. He was a ghost, so I don’t know if that counts as “back from the dead”.

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Obviously Big Arnie is (initially anyway) a machine in the first Terminator but despite his destruction in the first film he regularly returned changing from bad to good and from machine to human.

TCMF-2L

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Chow Yun-Fat’s character, Mark, was killed at the end of A Better Tomorrow. He was so popular because of the role that he was cast as Marks previously unmentioned twin brother in the sequel.

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The very first case I know of where someone who was undeniably killed in the original nevertheless shows up in a sequel is Ayesha, “She who Must be Obeyed”, from H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure (1887). There’s no question that she has died of extreme old age at the end of the novel. Nevertheless, she came back, reincarnated, in the sequel Ayesha: The Return of She (1905).

Since then lots of characters have come back. Forgive me for mention ing those who were mentioned above.

Count Dracula – staked (discreetly off-camera) in the 1931 film, he comes back (played by John Carradine, with a moustache) in House of Frankenstein when the stake is pulled out of his skeleton (This hadn’t occurred before in a Universal movie, but it did in MGM’s Return of the Vampire, which starred Lugosi, and was clearly Dracula in everything but name. As fa as I know the concept was introduced by the movies. It had never occurred before). But he gets killed by exposure to sunlight, which reduces him to a bloodless skeleton. But then he inexplicably came back again in House of Dracula, and again gets skeletonized by sunlight.
And then, of course, he’s back, equally inexplicably, and looking like Lugosi again, in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Speaking of Universal Horror Movies, Bela Lugosi’s Ygor was pretty clearly killed at the end of Son of Frankenstein, but he’s back in Ghost of Frankenstein without explanation. Maybe they missed.

Lawrence Talbot at The Wolfman dies at the end of The Wolfman, but they brought him back – evidently if you expose a dead wolfman to the rays of the moon it revivifies him, the way Varney the Vampyre was revived by moon rays a century earlier – in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. And he stayed alive through three more movies.

As I remarked in the other thread, crime boss Robert G. Durant (played by Larry Drake) was definitely killed in the original Darkman, but he was back for Darkman 2

Moriarty has been mentioned, but I don’t think it was stated that Doyle himself brought him back for The Valley of Fear, a novel whose timeline doesn’t appear to allow it to occur during the events of “The Final Problem”.

I mean, lots of others have brought Moriarty back, but they can say that Doyle himself had done it.