10 Movie Villains Who Won AFTER They Died

All evil computers owe a huge debt to the HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Voiced by the unnervingly calm Douglas Rain, HAL is responsible for most of the systems onboard the U.S. spacecraft, Discovery One on its mission to investigate a radio signal being sent from Earth's moon to Jupiter.

When mission pilots, Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) fear that HAL is malfunctioning, they discuss deactivating him; trying not to be overheard, they do not suspect that HAL is reading their lips. HAL severs Poole's oxygen supply when he is outside the vessel and sends him drifting into space. Although Bowman retrieves Poole's body in a life pod, HAL kills three scientists in hyper-sleep and locks Bowman out of the Discovery; Bowman attempts to reason with HAL, who enigmatically snubs him.

Stealing aboard the vessel, Bowman accesses the mainframe to disconnect HAL's units. The scene in which HAL tries to reassure Bowman before pleading with him to stop, reverting to a childlike state before he is shut down is one of the most famous and moving sequences in the film. However, once the Discovery reaches Jupiter, Bowman investigates a massive monolith there; the audience sees Bowman traveling across vast distances and perhaps even through time but, to the rest of the world, he is dead.

Although Peter Hyams's 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) sought to explain the HAL 9000's actions, the HAL of the original film is truly terrifying.