Steve Walker

Steve Walker is insulted by David McCall.

Steve Walker is the deuteragonist of the film Fear and is portrayed by William Petersen.

Biography

Steve Walker is a good-hearted father who wants the best for his children. His daughter, Nicole, is a fairly innocent teenager with a rebellious streak. Having been kicked out of her mother's house, she now lives with Steve, his new wife Laura and Laura's preteen son Toby in the suburbs of Seattle. At a rave, Nicole meets David McCall, who has a borderline personality disorder and antisocial features. She is swept off her feet by his sweet, polite nature. Steven seems to like David at first but gradually comes to become suspicious of him. Steven also gets angry when Nicole violates her curfews to spend more time with David. Eventually, while Steven and Laura are on vacation, Nicole and David have sex at her home flagrantly disobeying a house rule about unsupervised guests. One day, David scares Nicole by assaulting her friend Gary upon seeing them hug each other. He shoves Nicole to the ground when she tries to stop him, giving her a black eye. Nicole ends things with David, leaving him crushed, but her father's now-intense opposition to David paradoxically drives her to accept David's apologies. Steven checks into David's background. He finds out that David spent his early life with various foster families until he got arrested and institutionalized. When David turned 18, he was released from foster care.

Steven confronts David on a street corner and politely asks him to stop seeing Nicole. One night, Nicole witnesses David forcing her best friend Margo Masse to have sex with him. She misinterprets this as a consensual act and breaks the relationship off again. Nicole also ends her friendship with Margo, despite her pleas for forgiveness. When David finds out why Nicole dumped him, he threatens Margo with violence unless she fixes things with Nicole. David's obsession with Nicole turns increasingly violent and kills Gary in jealously by snapping his neck in the woods. David also vandalizes Steven's prized 1966 Ford Mustang convertible and leaves a taunting note to him: "Now I've popped both your cherries". Steven breaks into David's house; there he finds an obscene shrine that David has built for Nicole, along with a box containing a vandalized bracelet - it read "Daddy's Girl," but has been changed to "David's Girl" - and a pair of Nicole's underwear. Steven trashes the house. David returns home and promptly concludes that Steven has been there. He determines to break into the Walker residence, with the help of his equally violent friends: Hacker, Knobby, Logan, and Terry. A distraught Margo is at Nicole's house also, having come to inform the Walkers that Gary has been found dead in the woods.

David and his friends behead Kaiser, the Walkers' German Shepherd. When Hacker tries breaking into the kitchen with an axe, Laura injures his hand with a drill. Knobby escorts Hacker to a hospital. Terry attempts to get inside from upstairs, but Nicole knocks him to the yard below with an umbrella. Nicole signals Larry, the Walkers' private security guard, by flashing "SOS" with the light in her room. Larry arrives to see David, who's pretending to come from Nicole's house. Terry shoots and kills Larry. David, Logan, & Terry take Larry's handcuffs & gun, then force their way into the house by taking Steven hostage. They cuff up Steven and Laura, taping their mouths shut. When Logan attempts to rape Nicole; Margo intervenes and gets beaten as well. Toby, having escaped through another window, gets to Laura's SUV and uses her car phone to dial 9-1-1 (since David's friends cut the phone lines to the house). Toby has to start the engine to make the phone work; Terry notices this and shoots out the windshield - just missing Toby, who runs Terry down with the SUV. David brings a bound and gagged Steven into Nicole's room to "say goodbye" to his daughter; he also shoots Logan dead for trying to rape Nicole. Toby re-enters the house and gets the keys to the handcuffs, with which he frees both his parents. David gently tells Nicole, "It has to be this way," and asks her if she wants to go with him. To save her family, Nicole agrees to go and pretends to reciprocate his affection. Just then Steven rushes David, only to get pistol-whipped upside the head. David prepares to execute Steven but Nicole prevents this by stabbing David in the back with a "peace pipe" letter opener which David himself won at a carnival on a previous date with Nicole. Still clutching his gun, David gets up and lumbers toward Nicole; she stands ready for him, despite being less sure than ever of what he intends to do with her. Then Steven suddenly gets up and pounces on David from behind, disarming him. As Nicole looks on, both men fight until David is thrown from a window to his death. The family and Margo share a group-hug as the police and EMTs arrive.

Quotes

• "The big deal, Laura, is that the guy gives me the creeps, and the girl is my daughter."