In order for a story to have meaning, especially one with a lot of action and adventure and peril, someone’s gotta die.

Characters running around in fear for their lives loses some of its potency every time everyone makes it out alive, so here and there a good story starts picking some of them off. They don’t necessarily have to be the main characters — although they can be — but major character death is a necessity for a story to have any real weight. Some franchises wait until the very last entries to start knocking their pins down, while some go ahead and off a major character in the first installment.

That doesn’t always mean that those characters always stay dead, though. Long-running franchises have found plenty of ways to bring back long-dead mentors, friends, lovers, and protagonists — the more harebrained the explanation the better. How many times have we seen characters who definitely kicked the bucket resurrected as clones or upgraded versions, or revealed to have never actually died at all? (Rule of thumb: If the death happened offscreen, it didn’t happen!)

Here we’ve gathered a few iconic movie characters and the increasingly bizarre ways in which they were brought back to life. Some of them faked their deaths, others have amnesia. Some were resurrected through science, others through magic. Some come back with cool new skills, others barely return before they’re forced to die again, perhaps sacrificing themselves for the good of the other main characters. Whatever the reason — and the reasons are always strange — we’re glad we got to see (most of) these characters at least one more time.

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