Yes they do…but unfortunately it doesn’t cover our universe.
Vampire mythology is a welter of conflicting traditions. Our Fearless Leader wrote a column about it, back in the very early days of the Straight Dope (mostly codged from one book). Bram Stoker actually selected and streamlined it and made much of it canon when he wrote Dracula.
But staking through the heart has probably been the most standard and constant method of killing off vampires. It’s used to kill vampires in the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire and it’s how Carmilla meets her end in Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (She’s floating in blood in her coffin at the time – talk about overkill). It’s the method preferred and talked about in Stoker’s Dracula (even if they did go overboard with Lucy, and they didn’t actually kill Dracula that way – if he was killed). It’s certainly the way they killed Dracula in the stage play and the Universal movies. The vampire in Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (made about the same time as Universal’s Dracula) gets staked with a metal stake, rather than a wooden one, but it’s a stake nonetheless. Untold numbers of vampires in other films got done in that way.
Of course there were other ways (fire, acid, sunlight ever since the 1940s, after Nosferatu’s example). I’d bet that if you ran a vampire through a wood chipper they wouldn’t come back. Or if you dissolved it in holy water. In I Am Legend Richard Matheson has his hero killed his vampires with a stake until he learns that it’s effective because it keeps the arteries open, after which he simply puts a lot of slashes in his vampires to make them bleed out.
Things like the “pinned in the grave by the stake” strike me as after-the-fact speculations. It’s not given as the reason in most accounts.
Vampire legend changes through the years as writer add or ignore strengths and weaknesses to meet the needs of their plots. In the 1985 movie Once Bitten one of the vampire “facts” is that the vampire has to bite its victim three times in one year to “turn” them, something that no one else has used. And, as far as I can tell, nobody else is interested in using Stephanie Meyer’s “sparkling” vampires from the Twilight series.
I’ve wondered whether Doyle deliberately “killed off” Holmes in a way that left open the possibility of his not really being dead.
It’s not killing off a character only to bring them back later, but sort of along the same lines:
Frank Baum wanted to stop writing stories about the land of Oz, so he ended the sixth Oz book with Glinda casting a magic spell that would make Oz completely unreachable and invisible to the rest of the world.
But then, a couple years later, he revived the series, through the magic of modern technology:
According to Adams’s comments in The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts (pub. 1985), as he was wracking his brain to find a way to save his heroes and write the next episode, he happened to watch a TV show about jiu jitsu. The man on the show said that it didn’t matter if your opponent outweighed you - if you know how to redirect that weight then the weight becomes an asset for you and a problem for your opponent.
So he started pondering how he could make the improbability of them being rescued be a solution, rather than a problem.
Oh - I forgot a bigger impossible sequel. In So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, the dolphins bring back the earth, which had been demolished in the first chapter/episode.
I’ve been watching True Blood lately and am up to the fifth season. They make up a whole bunch of vampire tropes. In particular, victims are not turned simply by being bitter, whether they survive or are drained entirely of blood and killed. You have to be buried for 24 hours together with a vampire in order to be turned, who then becomes your “parent.” I don’t know if any other version used this.
Vampires are killed mainly by being staked or shot through the heart with a wooden stake or bullet Instantly bursting into disgusting goop), or being burned up by the sun. However, in at least one case one appeared to be killed by being decapitated.
I swear I’ve read, but can no longer find a cite, that Lucas added the scene showing the 2 halves of Darth Maul falling down the shaft separately to make it utterly clear that he was dead and was never coming back.
Well, sure, but: Adams had already written in time travel by then. He didn’t really need to come up with something odd about the dolphins; he’d already had the characters haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome.
That might have been his intent, but he also gave us General Greivous, a cyborg missing even more of his body than Maul lost, so he opened a door to bringing back Maul with a similar cybernetic intervention.
I recall that as well. IIRC the shot was added after audiences at the initial charity premiere screenings speculated Maul wasn’t really dead and was such a great character he just had to come back for the sequels.
I also remember that the reason the Savage Oppress character on Clone Wars was created was that showrunner Dave Filoni wanted to bring back Maul, but Lucas said “Nope, nope, he’s dead and staying that way”. So Filoni created a new force sensitive Sith apprentice character of the same species.
About a year later, after seeing Oppess is action, Lucas changed his mind and asked Filoni to resurrect Maul as Oppress’ brother. Cynics noticed the timing lined up with when Lucas was ramping up the promotional campaign for the 3D rerelease of Phantom Menace. The Clone Wars story arc with Maul’s return aired at the same time the rerelease was in theatres.
He was only mostly dead.
He got better.
Speaking of Star Wars characters falling into a pit, Boba Fett survived falling into the Sarlacc Pit in Return of the Jedi----- at least in the original Star Wars expanded universe works which are no longer considered canon.
I figured that Captain Phasma would also return, because she was last seen falling a long way and vanishing into a fireball. But, as far as I know, she’s still dead, so I guess that doesn’t count as a bottomless pit.
Rumor is that the Madalorian TV show is going to re-canonize that bit.
We’re up to 94 posts and no one has mentioned John Snow? He was well and truly dead on a show that really was not at all shy about killing off major characters only to be resurrected in the next episode. John’s untimely passing and subsequent recovery is hardly ever mentioned again.
Looking up this topic on the internet, I find the expected TV Tropes pages on it ( Back from the Dead - TV Tropes ) and various webpages about killed and revived characters ( such as here – https://www.tvfanatic.com/slideshows/23-characters-who-came-back-from-the-dead/ )
These aren’t quite what I’m looking for – I’m thinking of cases where a character gets killed (ideally, definitely and completely, with the corpse destroyed and all), yet the creators nevertheless write or film a sequel involving that character because they like them too much, or the public demanded it. They might come up with some clever dodge (they weren’t really dead) or some metaphysical tripe (reincarnation! Or their katra is still around) or they might just not bother explaining (Ygor!)
Maybe the First Law Of Resurrection trope?
Just saw this article, where now Lucas is saying that Maul was supposed to be the main villain in his concept for the sequel trilogy. Which, knowing Lucas, doesn’t invalidate anything you or Muldoon were saying.
Julie Newmar’s Catwoman fell down a bottomless chasm at the end of her first two-parter episode of Batman in 1966. I don’t think her reappearance later was ever explained.
Nine lives.