Generally speaking, movie villains are killed by the hero at the end of the story, because why wouldn’t they be? It gives audiences a welcome moment of catharsis and ensures to send them home happy.
But sometimes filmmakers want to do something different and dare to shirk convention.
That is to say, they ditch the traditional rules of Hollywood screenwriting and have the antagonist actually be dead from the start of the story instead.
And so, following up on our previous article on movies where the hero was dead all along, we now turn our attention to those villains who were already taking a dirt nap when things kicked off.
These villains were all ultimately revealed to have died early on – perhaps even before the movie started – and so their presence literally haunted the film for its remainder, until we finally learned the shocking truth at the end.
While the whole “dead all along” shtick is a tricky gambit to pull off these days with modern audiences being so thoroughly primed to anticipate it, having it be the antagonist rather than the protagonist who was secretly dead is certainly a fresh twist…
Hellraiser: Hellseeker – the sixth entry into the not-so-illustrious horror franchise – revolves around Trevor Gooden (Dean Winters), a man who is involved in a car accident at the beginning of the movie, and wakes up in hospital a month later.
Hellseeker’s ending offers up a double-whammy of surprises, because not only does it reveal that Trevor is actually a Very Bad Guy, but also that he’s been dead since the start of the movie.
The climactic twist is that Trevor was killed by his wife, the series’ human protagonist Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence), who shot him while he was driving and made it look like a suicide, in revenge for him cheating on and plotting to kill her.
Trevor’s distorted grasp on reality throughout the film has actually been a result of him residing in Hell, where he’s been forced to pore back over his sinful past.
At the end, his soul becomes the property of Pinhead (Doug Bradley) while Kirsty scores a clean getaway. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.