10 Horror Movie Characters Who Died Off-Screen In The Sequel
4. Dr. Sam Loomis - Halloween H20: 20 Years Later & Halloween (2018)
Halloween's Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) is one of the very few fictional characters, horror or otherwise, to have suffered this fate twice in the same damn franchise.
In Halloween H20, Loomis' ambiguous fate from the previous film is resolved when he's revealed to have died between movies, seemingly of natural causes, due to Donald Pleasence himself passing away.
But with the franchise receiving a continuity reset with 2018's new Halloween - a direct sequel to the 1978 original - Loomis' death was seemingly retconned.
Well, not quite.
Halloween 2018 takes place 40 years after Michael Myers' (James Jude Courtney) original rampage, and it's revealed that Dr. Loomis died at an unspecified time during those four decades. To hammer the point home, a new psychiatrist character, Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), is even nicknamed "the new Loomis" by Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).
Obviously Pleasence's 1995 death prevented him from appearing in the 2018 sequel, though the next film, Halloween Kills, did bring the character back in a brief opening flashback, employing impressively believable prosthetics to depict a 1978 version of Loomis with a stand-in.