10 Movies Where The Hero Was Dead All Along

10. Jacob's Ladder

Jacob's Ladder opens with the titular protagonist (Tim Robbins) serving in the Vietnam War, where during a sudden attack he's stabbed with a bayonet by an enemy combatant.

After this, Jacob wakes up on 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 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 movie's events have in fact been his brain making sense of everything that's happened to him as he expires.

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 (Macaulay Culkin) death, a vision of whom leads him into a bright light as he dies.