David Leatherhoff is a protagonist in horror gam Afraid of Monsters and minor character in Cry of Fear
History
David Leatherhoff is the main character of Afraid of Monsters and the Director's Cut. After receiving bottle after bottle of an unknown drug from an anonymous source to help with his nightmares, he finally decided to seek help at the local hospital. After wandering into the bathroom, David finds yet another bottle of the drug before him. Unable to control himself, he takes the pills. Soon after, David passes out and delves into a nightmare, yet this time he notices that they are much, much worse. Some time later, David awakens to a now abandoned hospital, everyone has disappeared.
David soon discovers that his nightmares aren't in his head anymore, they are now real. David then fights to survive against the horrifying horde of monsters.
Fate
Depending on paths and choices taken in the game, the player can have a total of four endings (Director's cut only with the exception of the Original Ending).
- Ending 1 - David wakes up in a house, surrounded by dead bodies covered in blood. The monsters that he had been killing to survive were in fact innocent people. With the police outside surrounding him, he is soon arrested and put into prison.
- Ending 2 - David is shown being questioned by a police officer. He reveals he does not remember what happened during his drug-induced hallucination.
- Ending 3 - A person reads a newspaper that reads: "Killer Claims Over 20 lives". David is shown in his cell, dead, having hanged himself.
- Ending 4 - After fighting his worst nightmare, The Addiction, David is shown lying on a hospital bed, dead. The doctors fight to keep him alive, but nothing works. A couple of seconds later, David's pulse returns. He had barely survived a drug overdose.
After tracking down the hospital, the camera blacks out. It says: "The End, or is it?".
Trivia
- In the secret ending of Cry of Fear (which is non-canonical with the whole story), Simon (the protagonist of CoF) is run over by a very stoned David, prior to being addicted. David slams his van into Simon in a crash, revealing how Simon was crippled. David runs away from Simon, presumably because he didn't want to get in trouble with the police.
- It is believed from there (by fans) that after the crash, David saw what he had done and went to Markland Hospital to get help, this is the turning point where he decides to finally quit using the drugs and so got the prescription of the painkillers, which he would take indesperation to get off of his drug addiction so he won't repeat another incident like he did to Simon.
- This would also explain why in the road scene when David is driving on the road the words "FORGIVE ME" quickly appear briefly twice. David is pleading for forgiveness that he is driving whilst on addicted to a drug.
- A theory from fans leads to the idea that the Wheelchair Twitcher is actually a manifestation of Simon, due to the fact that in one of the endings in Cry of Fear, Simon is sent to an insane asylum. In one point in Afraid of Monsters, David runs into an insane asylum, and meets a man in a wheelchair.
- It is also worth noting that the wheelchair that Simon sits in, is actually the same model and uses the same textures as the wheelchair that the Wheelchair Twitcher itself sits in.
- A theory from fans leads to the idea that the Wheelchair Twitcher is actually a manifestation of Simon, due to the fact that in one of the endings in Cry of Fear, Simon is sent to an insane asylum. In one point in Afraid of Monsters, David runs into an insane asylum, and meets a man in a wheelchair.
- Although it may not be cannon, in the Cry of Fear custom campaign "Halloween Collab" it is shown that Doctor Purnell treated David as a patient, advising him to cut down on the pills.
- David's axe and hoodie are also usable items in Cry of Fear.
- The EA 45 on David's hoodie stands for "Emma + Andreas Forever", Andreas being the creator of the game and Emma being his girlfriend.
- David is very similar to the protagonist of Cry of Fear, Simon. Both are troubled young men with psychosis (David's psychosis is mild, made severe through drugs whilst Simon's mild psychosis is made severe through depression), wear a colorless hoodie and finger-less gloves, and fight Twitchers and other hostile abominations in their minds.
- David's corpse appears in the Half-Life 2 mod, Grey, as an Easter Egg.
- David Leatherhoff appears in the Afraid of Monsters conversion in Sven Co-op, another acclaimed Half-Life mod. On the main server, the owner, Cocyx the Skeleton, gives himself a bastardized David model and harasses the players by playing sound-clips, turning off the power, jumpscaring and killing them, etc.
- Although it cannot be seen, in the third ending as David's lifeless corpse is hung in his padded cell, his face has been disfigured to have his eyes gouged out and mouth has been stitched to say the words "DEAD". Whether this was intentional or just used as a placeholder is unknown, although as the team needed to create the model to depict David's suicide, it is most likely that these were left in as an easter egg for the game's fans.
Gallery
Dead David
