10 Horror Movie Characters You Thought Were Dead For Sure
These characters were dead meat... until they weren't.
What would the overwhelming majority of horror movies be without at least a little death? After all, it remains life's grand mystery for us all, and something the genre has resultingly explored with a giddy enthusiasm since its modest origins.
But sometimes filmmakers love to toy with audiences and their expectations of how death is typically presented in movies, such as by leading us to believe that certain characters have kicked the bucket, only to later reveal that this actually wasn't the case at all.
With that in mind, these 10 horror movie characters all appeared to get pretty decisively dispatched - whether on-screen or not - only to turn up alive a good while later.
Perhaps their survival made for a dramatic mic drop moment, or maybe it was so hilariously trivial as to only be revealed by the filmmakers later on, but either way, we all assumed these characters were totally done for, right?
As such, there are probably a few lessons to take away from this list: nobody's dead unless you actually see them die on-screen, and even then, it's still not guaranteed...
10. The Mother - The Mist
There are few horror movie characters who have more aggressively outed themselves as a goner than the unnamed mother played by Melissa McBride in The Mist.
The woman is shopping at the supermarket when the mist envelops the town and Lovecraftian creatures begin feasting on anyone in the vicinity.
Though most people in the store agree to remain inside for their own safety, the woman insists that she must return home to her two children.
While numerous other characters warn her against this, she ventures outside into the mist anyway, and the audience is left to assume that she perished with about 99.8% certainty.
And so it provides quite the added gut-punch at the end of the movie, when, after protagonist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) mercy-kills four fellow survivors - including his own son - moments before the Army arrives, this woman is briefly seen among the convoy, safe and sound with her two kids in tow.
Everyone assumed she probably got ripped apart a few feet outside the supermarket door, but alas, she somehow avoided getting devoured.