10 Movies Where The Hero Was Dead All Along

Clint Eastwood's legendary 1975 western Pale Rider sees Eastwood playing a character known only as The Preacher, a shadowy gunslinger who helps protect a prospecting town from a mining tycoon, and whose precise identity is kept intentionally vague.

The film's biblically-inclined title of course suggests right off the bat that the Preacher might well be the personification of Death, per a famous bible quote: "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death and Hell followed with him."

There are more overt hints throughout that the Preacher isn't quite of this world - namely Marshal Stockburn (John Russell) literally referring to him as "dead" at one point - and Eastwood himself eventually confirmed the theories in an interview, that the Preacher is indeed "an out-and-out ghost."

Audiences are ultimately still free to believe whatever they want given that the film itself doesn't explicitly out the Preacher as a ghost, but Eastwood himself has certainly made his filmmaking intention clear.