Characters / Remedy Connected Universe: The Dark Place

Remedy Connected Universe Character Index
Alan Wake | Bright Falls | Federal Bureau of Control | Paranatural Phenomena | The Dark Place

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The Dark Presence / Paranatural Entity A-010 "The Shadow"

Appearances: Alan Wake | Alan Wake's American Nightmare | Control | Alan Wake II

"For a long time, the Dark Presence had been weak, sleeping, nothing but a half-forgotten nightmare or a shadowy flicker in the corner of an eye in the forest at night; not real enough to properly exist, and yet too evocative to fade away completely."

"I'm much older than you. Older than your first work of art. I will find a new face to wear. Someone else to dream me free."

The central antagonist of the Alan Wake games, a hostile supernatural entity that exists within Cauldron Lake. It makes use of avatars and sentient forces under its hold to interact with the human world, seeking to release itself from confinement, as well as having a force of its own in the form of the Taken.

Due to the overarching nature of the Dark Presence, spoilers will be unmarked.

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In General

• Alien Geometries: In Alan Wake II, the New York it conjures up relies on this to keep Alan disoriented. Some examples include a building that is a single straight hallway leading to the same door he enters through, and an underground bar's entrance taking him to the roof.
• Always Night: The one constant of the Dark Place is that the environments it forms from the minds of its victims will always look to be at the dead of night, for obvious reasons.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Implied. Wake's notes indicate that the Dark Presence is technically a stronger extradimensional entity than the Hiss, as the only reason the Hiss was able to influence Hartman was because his physical form was too far from the Presence itself. The fact that Wake apparently created the Hiss as a Starter Villain for Jesse further suggests this.
• Animalistic Abomination: The swarms of Taken Ravens which it will sometimes unleash on you, and in the American Nightmare DLC you will also be attacked by swarms of Taken Spiders, which are specifically noted to be one of the creatures native to the Dark Place.
  • In the Bright Falls prequel miniseries, it possesses a "14-point stag" to harass the protagonist with.
• Author Avatar: It makes stories come to life, it directs the flow of the plot, and it ultimately is the reason anything in the game happened. Draw your own conclusions.
• Big Bad: Of the Alan Wake centered games in the series, being the driving force behind the supernatural events happening around the Bright Falls area.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The developer commentary track remarks that the Dark Presence is an utterly alien being that simply doesn't understand human morality, or even human behavior, which is why it lets Wake get away with a lot of the stuff he does. However, it does understand humans well enough to manipulate Wake by holding Alice hostage, as well as to lure him into a trap using Rose.
• Came Back Wrong: What happened to Barbara Jagger. Anybody who it plans to turn into one of its Taken thralls usually goes missing before coming back as a demented slave.
• Chicken-and-Egg Paradox: Alan's monologue at the end of "The Final Draft" implies that it was "born", so to speak, when Saga shot him with the bullet of light at the end of the first loop, but it had already existed long before that and was the ultimate reason that Alan and Saga were even there. The time-bending nature of The Dark Place means that present-day actions can affect the past, which explains this.
• Create Your Own Hero: It's the one granting Alan Wake his Rewriting Reality powers... which it's implied he then used to "create" Jesse for the expressed purpose of making someone to help free him from the Dark Place and defeat the Dark Presence.
• Create Your Own Villain: In a sense; it helped inspire Alan Wake's indirect "creation" of the Hiss. The two entities are shown to despise each other and attempt to assert their influence over the same person in AWE.
• Creative Sterility: Its modus operandi is to corrupt other people's work for its own means, and it's suggested in one of the pages for American Nightmare that it might not have much of an imagination, due to its Taken coming in only a few types, rather than the more aggressive and varied ones Mr. Scratch creates.
  • Alan Wake II expands on this with the outright assertion by Alan that the Presence can not create anything without taking it wholesale from something else. Alan comes to understand even his childhood nightmares and the inspiration it gave him were the Dark Presence subtly influencing him from the beginning on a subconscious level with visions of other real people (including the real Alex Casey).
• Creepy Crows: The Dark Presence will sometimes sic flocks of Taken Ravens upon Wake.
• Cutscene Boss: After Alan fights the Tornado and dives into Cauldron Lake, it's finished off by Alan using the clicker inside where Barbara's heart once was in a cutscene. This doesn't finish it off permanently, but it does erase Barbara Jagger's image for good.
• Dark Is Evil: It's an Eldritch Abomination associated with darkness, to the point where it essentially is the Primal Fear of darkness and nighttime. The closest we see to an undiluted "physical form" for the entity itself are large splotches of tar-like sludge.
• Death World: The Dark Place is a dimension naturally incongruent with long-term human life. The landscape naturally shapes itself into a twisted version of a person's memory which can change on a whim in impossible ways. It is a playground for eldritch abominations which sic an endless horde of shadow monsters on anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped within.
• Eldritch Abomination: According to Alan's reading of Zane's poetry, the Presence is an avatar of a vast, horrible monstrosity that is explicitly compared to a Lovecraftian being.
• Eldritch Location: The Dark Place, its realm underneath the dark waters of Cauldron Lake. Time still flows underneath but its existence is how the Presence can make stories and works of fiction come true.
  Alan: The dark place I found myself in was unlike anything I could ever have imagined; it wasn't solid, it flowed. It was conceptual and subjective.
• Elemental Motifs: The Dark Place and Presence have a strong connection to water; it is described as being the lake as much as it is in the lake, areas further under its influence are flooded, and after clearing the Overlaps the flooding instantly dissipates.
• Emotion Eater: It becomes far easier for a person to be Taken by the Dark Presence if they are feeling an intense negative emotion. While the Presence usually just falls back on making their victims feel intense fear, other emotions such as resentment and paranoia work just as well.
• Enemy Civil War: Both it and the Hiss are fighting for control over Dr. Emil Hartman's body in the AWE expansion. Due to it being the first to have control over him, The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman still mostly draws from the powers and abilities of a Taken.
• Enemy to All Living Things: It shows little regard toward any life other than itself, and will infect animals as often as humans to attack its victims. Taken also seem compelled to attack non-Taken animals, which we see with several innocent dogs throughout Alan Wake.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Its powers of corruption aren't limited to living creatures. It can corrupt inanimate objects in order to throw them at Alan or block his path.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: The Oblivion to Scratch, in Alan Wake II. While he comes up with a plan to rule over the world as a universally beloved figure, the Presence itself still desires the complete overtake of the reality with itself. It comes closer than ever due to the chaos in Bright Falls weakening the borders between the two dimensions, but Saga successfully seals off the various Thresholds.
• Fighting a Shadow: The possibility of killing the entire being is never even considered by Alan. It is a formless mass of shadows, who quickly recovers whenever the Avatar it uses to fight for it is destroyed despite the Avatars all being incredibly dangerous in their own right.
• Final Boss, New Dimension: The above Cutscene Boss is inside the Dark Place, under Cauldron Lake.
• Genius Loci: The Dark Place, its home dimension underneath Cauldron Lake. The Dark Presence is one of the many entities that reside within it, but it closely follows its own whims and models itself after what it requires, essentially being a part of it.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For AWE. It's never encountered directly by Jesse in the Oldest House, but its influence is certainly felt in the form of the Third Thing.
• Hell Is That Noise: Other than the way it distorts the noises of things it makes Taken to inhuman growling or high-pitched shrieks, the Dark Presence has its own unique noises which makes the entity itself sound like a ghostly predator on the prowl.
• Hostile Weather: The strongest effect it has while trapped in the Dark Place is usually a demonstration of control over the weather. It regularly summons up tornados to pursue victims and it causes enough rain to flood as its influence grows.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Entity itself chooses an "Avatar" to either act out its will or speak directly for it. In the first game it is Barbara Jagger, though after her destruction it divvies itself up between multiple smaller "Overlap Guardians" in Alan Wake II.
• Invincible Boogeyman: Throughout the Initiation chapters of Alan Wake II, the Dark Presence physically manifests as a screaming black mass that tears up the environment around it. Alan can do nothing to fight it off or defeat it in this state, and is instead forced to flee to the nearest Break Room.
• Jackass Genie: When using it to bring your story to life, you better be damn sure it makes perfect sense according to its own internal rules and logic, or else the Dark Presence will happily fill in any Plot Holes you may have left to skew things more towards its liking. For instance, Thomas Zane wrote Barbara Jagger back to life, but neglected to explain how she came back to life. The Dark Presence brought her back to life as its own physical avatar.
• Leaking Can of Evil: While the Dark Presence is indeed trapped in the lake, it still possesses a frighteningly powerful hold over the region around it as the amount of strange events, disappearances, and general paranormal activity in and around Bright Falls shows. It can also reach out from its prison to a certain degree, as it did when it appeared in the guise of Barbara Jagger to trap Alan by giving him the keys to the cabin on Cauldron Lake, setting up the opportunity for it to kidnap his wife and enthrall him later. And that’s not getting into the fact that it can make fiction become reality should it have access to a particularly talented mind.
• Living Shadow: The Dark Presence is naturally this but on a massive scale. Credit also goes to the Taken, as they materialize out of (and disappear into) thin air like ghosts and are covered with a shroud of pure darkness that turns them into blurred outlines amongst the fog they emerge from.
• Magic A Is Magic A: It follows a set parameter to make itself stronger. Essentially, any written work composed within its territory (aka near Cauldron Lake) will become reality as it is written. But in doing so, it draws power from what it makes happen based off the text, and it will also take advantage of any loopholes it can find in the structure — like a Plot Hole or Deus ex Machina — to protect itself or give itself a boost.
• Meaningful Name: Both aspects of its name call to attention different aspects of the entity. Obviously, "Dark" refers to its Dark Is Evil motif and association with shadows. "Presence" can refer to something unseen yet present, much like the Presence being naturally formless yet all surrounding when night falls.
• Mind Rape: One of Alan Wake's Hotline messages reveals that it's been attempting to wipe his memory to get him to slip up and write it free again.
• Monster from Beyond the Veil: Thomas Zane unwittingly ushers a Humanoid Abomination into being when he attempts to resurrect his lover, Barbara Jagger, by Rewriting Reality. The catch is, this ability comes from being near the "magic lake" she drowned in, because it hosts a Reality Warper Eldritch Abomination. Since he does it via Deus ex Machina, she Came Back Wrong, as a soulless physical avatar of the Dark Presence. Whoops.
• Raising the Steaks: The Dark Presence is not averse to the prospect of possessing animals as well, as seen with the Taken Ravens and Wolves in the first and second games respectively.
• Reality Warper: It's capable of this through written works composed near or within it. Due to its own rules, even if said work brings it harm, it must still bring it to fruition regardless, but it will use any loophole it can find to make itself stronger.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: It's been stuck under its Threshold underneath Cauldron Lake for an unknown period of time. Due to the work of all the creators it has attempted to influence over the decades (Alan the latest) it has remained more or less safely contained for all of that time.
• Signature Move: Its most reoccurring attack is the Tornado Move. It summons up a full, independent tornado to chase Wake several times throughout Alan Wake, and Barbara, Nightingale, and Scratch himself all make use of the attack throughout the series.
• Subliminal Seduction: By the time of Alan Wake II, the Presence has moved on to this tactic to try and keep Wake complacent. Throughout its version of New York, various posters, billboards, and graffiti all have Double Meaning messages insulting Alan's writing and telling him to stop his attempts to escape.
• Time Abyss: As an incomprehensible monster from a reality beyond a Threshold, time has little meaning to it. It still indicates just how long it has existed to Alan, with its declaration of both predating Alan and being able to long outlast him serving as Barbara's final taunt.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Outside the Dark Presence's domain, time works as it does in real life. Inside the Dark Place, things can be weird. Alan suggests he has spent even longer than 13 years trapped from his own perspective, and while he and Saga are convening in the Overlaps, he somehow meets her out of order, with her second Overlap convening with his third murder scene and vice versa.
• Villain Ball: An odd justified case: Despite explicitly needing Alan alive for its plan to work, it repeatedly sends dangerous enemies after him that pose a serious risk to his life. However, it only does this because Alan wrote into his story that it would. Since it's bringing his story to life, it has no choice but to behave as he depicted it.
• Villainous Breakdown: Over the course of the last two episodes of Alan Wake, it becomes more and more desperate to stop, and then outright kill Wake, frustrated by the many narrow misses the storyline is forcing it into. It builds up to increasing amounts of enemies and poltergeists, disruption and destruction of the environment, scouring the bottom of Cauldron Lake for wreckage to rain upon Wake, and finally a huge tornado with Jagger at its center. All throughout this, she spouts weak, ineffectual threats and insults that only serve to indicate that, at least to the extent that the concept applies to it, the Dark Presence is scared.
• The Virus: It corrupts some of the Bright Falls locals, turning them into the "Taken" who you fight most of the time.
• Walking Spoiler: Its mere existence in AWE spoils that Control is actually a Stealth Sequel to Alan Wake.

Avatars

Barbara Jagger

Barbara Jagger

Portrayed by: Kate Weiman

Appearances: Alan Wake

"Back to work, boy."

"She's not here. You were foolish to think so. No, she's dead, she drowned."

Thomas Zane's former lover and muse, a longtime resident of Bright Falls who disappeared one day along with him and the cabin the two lived in at Cauldron Lake. She's somehow returned and appears to Alan along his journey.

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• Animal Motif: Ravens. She wears an all-black mourning gown with a veil that resembles a raven's beak over her noticeably pointed nose, she lives in a lake with an island that noticeably resembles a bird's foot and ravens are everywhere in the town area.
• Body Horror: It's revealed late in Alan Wake that in an attempt to kill her after her return, Tom Zane carved out her heart. She survived this and we see the gaping hole through her chest on several occasions.
• Came Back Wrong: She used to be a really sweet and kind lady in her youth, until moving into Cauldron Lake with Thomas. Then she was pulled under the water and Thomas, encouraged by his then-assistant Hartman, used the lake's rumored power to bring her back... but the Deus ex Machina allowed the Dark Presence to twist things and make her into an avatar. Zane (in Alan's voice) even says this trope verbatim in a flashback within the Dark Place.
• Dead All Along: The real Barbara Jagger died after being pulled under the waves in her swim. What came back was the avatar used by the Dark Presence.
• Empty Shell: While Tom's intention was to bring her Back from the Dead, since he did not write in a reasonable explanation for his Reality Warping, she returned as nothing but a vessel for the Dark Presence.
• Evil Counterpart: She's to Thomas Zane what Alice is to Alan, his one true love and muse they tragically lost and made their lives' goal to bring back. But due to the Dark Presence, the Barbara Jagger that came back was only a host for the evil beneath Cauldron Lake, a shell that manipulated Tom emotionally and embodied his own insecurities as an author the same way the Dark Presence attempts with Alan through his memories of Alice.
• Evil Old Folks: An old lady in her 60s who gives off a dangerous dark aura wherever she appears.
• Faux Affably Evil: When she first meets Alan she compliments his wife and gives him the alleged keys to his vacation spot without incident. This is in contrast to the rest of her appearances manipulating him and Rose for the Dark Presence's ends.
• Honey Trap: The Taken Barbara tried to lure Tom to bed not long after her revival during her attempts to convince him nothing was wrong. He saw through the ruse and didn't fall for the trap.
• Humanoid Abomination: While she looks like an elderly human woman, it's ultimately revealed that the real Barbara Jagger died a long time ago. The entity that Alan encounters throughout the game is the Dark Presence itself wearing Jagger’s appearance like a suit, giving itself form and a voice through stealing her own.
• Killed Off for Real: After decades of her body being used as a puppet for the Dark Presence, anything that was left of her was finally destroyed when Alan used the Clicker to purge the Darkness from within.
• The Lost Lenore: She serves as this to Tom Zane, her random death by drowning driving him to a depression and looking for a way to bring her back, to disastrous results.
• Meaningful Name: Her name is an Anglo interpretation of Baba Yaga, the infamous witch of Slavic and Russian folklore who lived in a cabin in the woods that was said to stand on chicken legs. This also ties back to the cabin in Cauldron Lake being named "Bird Leg Cabin" and the fact it stands on an island that resembles a crow's talons.
• Ms. Fanservice: She was noted in her obituary to have been the three time winner of the Miss Deerfest pageant the town held. Unfortunately, the Dark Presence made no effort to preserve these looks.
• Naturalized Name: In Alan Wake II, the movies made by the filmmaker Zane credit her as "Baba Jakala". Due to the movie's alterations of reality, it can be assumed her backstory was altered so that, like the Zane imposter who overtook the original Poet identity, she had her name changed to an anglicized variant when she moved to Bright Falls.
• Obviously Evil: She wears a black mourning gown at all times, speaks in a manner which seems vaguely threatening even when she is simply talking about a vacation spot, and first appears spontaneously in a dark, secluded hallway.
• Red Baron: As an old folk story from the Bright Falls area, she's since been given the nicknames of "The Scratching Hag" and "Granny Claws".
• Throw the Dog a Bone: This House of Dreams reveals her spirit was saved from the Dark Place by Tom the Diver, who was able to form a Pocket Dimension in the Dark Place where they could both be at peace after decades of torment by the Dark Place.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: All evidence pointed to her being a loving, gentle woman and good wife to Tom Zane. Despite this, she died young by drowning completely randomly one day and later had her reputation ruined as she devolved into a folk myth the town used to scare their young.
• Tornado Move: In the final confrontation against the whirlwind in Alan Wake, she is at the center of the tornado and it only dissolves when she is forced away with flare gun shots.
• Widow's Weeds: She emerged from Cauldron Lake wearing a mourning gown she uses to this day.

Mr. Scratch

Mr. Scratch

Portrayed by: Matthew Porretta (voice), Ilkka Villi (model)

Appearances: Alan Wake | Alan Wake's American Nightmare | Super Effective Sales Trailer | Control | Alan Wake II

"We made this! Our story! Our ending! Our book! We are one! We belong together! Welcome me back home!"

^{Click here to see him in American Nightmare:}
"Do you know the real difference between us? I'm not afraid to be the center of attention."

"I know it bothers you that I’m like this, that I use your name and crawl my way into your life. But I only do it because... I'm better at being you than you ever were!"

Originating from the Dark Place, he is a new avatar for the Dark Presence and the embodiment of all negative stories and loose rumors ever told about Alan, making him a maniacal, flamboyant, sadistic serial killer. Capable of travelling freely between the Dark Place and the real world, he finds delight in threatening Alan with taking over his life and killing Alice and constantly sharing his monstrous deeds with him.

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• Allegorical Character: Alan states that he's essentially all the bad rumors and tabloid stories about him made flesh, which is represented as Scratch being loud, wanting to be the center of attention, and lacking all of Alan's redeeming qualities along with being a serial killer. II simplifies this into him simply being the Dark Presence in Alan's form, though he can still be viewed as an allegorical character for Alan's worst traits - his ego, insecurity, self-hatred, and impulsiveness.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: He launches into several monologues detailing his plans of torture and pain for Alan's friends, family, and associates over the course of American Nightmare, though he never gets to act on them. Control shows he has taken to haunting Alice in the time between games.
• Arch-Enemy: He steadily becomes this more and more to Alan throughout his appearances. While the Dark Presence is the source of his issues and Scratch's creator, its motives and reasonings are far too otherworldly for it to see anything as a nemesis. Scratch, however, feels very personal hatred toward Alan and does everything in his power not only to make Alan suffer, but the people he's close to suffer as well.
• Attention Whore: Is pretty clear about this right from the start. The only thing that even comes close to killing in his mind is someone paying him a compliment, such as a young woman who came up to him and started gushing about how much she loved Alan's books. He kept her life a bit longer than usual just to hear more of it.
• Ax-Crazy: Unlike the calm, collected Barbara Jagger, this guy's a loudmouth psychopath in love with himself. By the time of Alan Wake II his already tenuous sanity has taken a nosedive, his cheery demeanor replaced with a perpetual, foaming-at-the-mouth animalistic hatred aimed at everything and everyone around him.
• Back from the Dead: He seems to be killed by the light of the movie projector at the end of American Nightmare, but Control shows he somehow reformed afterward and continued to haunt Alice.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: He may be crazy and evil, but in direct contrast to Alan's more practical clothing choice, he rocks a sharp, distinguished suit.
• Barbarian Long Hair: He develops a far more aggressive personality and is far more actively angered in his demeanor by Alan Wake II, and both his hair and beard are both far longer and more unkempt.
• Berserk Button: While it never changes his mood too much, considering he's always in a barely veiled homicidal rage, he shows an annoyance toward other people being too loud for him. He kills off Bound and Gagged Michael Farabee for struggling when he "likes it quiet" and he goes after a party next door for repeatedly thumping against the wall while he's trying to speak to Alan.
• Big Bad: The main antagonistic force behind Alan Wake's American Nightmare, with the Dark Presence as a whole relegated to the Greater-Scope Villain. Comes back as this in full force in Alan Wake II with a far more efficient plan to overtake reality.
• Boom, Headshot!: Immediately after he repossesses Alan in the final scene of II, Saga uses the Bullet of Light to exorcise him with a shot to the forehead, looping both himself and Alan to the beginning of the story.
• Born as an Adult: When he see him first formed in the Dark Place at the end of Alan Wake, he is a perfect double of the already in his mid-30s Alan.
• Bragging Theme Tune:
  • "The Happy Song," In it, the singer rants about his psychopathy with a kind of twisted pride, engaging in Evil Gloating about the listener's impending death. In-universe, Mr. Scratch is shown happily dancing to it as Source Music after murdering the people who were partying and playing the song too loudly in the room next to his.
  "I told you I'm a psycho, psycho, PSYCHO, yeah!"
  • While it's not used during an in-game cutscene, the song "Dark, Twisted and Cruel", which plays in Alan Wake II after the chapter titled "Scratch" and his big reveal and first boss fight, also seems to be from his perspective, and is just as boastful as The Happy Song, but much more violent, visceral and rough, melodically and lyrically, fitting his changed personality and nature in the second game.
• Breakout Character: All appearances suggested he was killed at the end of American Nightmare after serving as The Heavy of its plotline. Despite this, his popularity with the fanbase for his laughable and bombastic personality endured, and he made a surprise cameo return in Control and came back into the larger plot in Alan Wake II.
• The Cameo: Confirming his survival of American Nightmare, he has a brief appearance in the AWE expansion of Control, photographed by Alice looking utterly deranged during one of his now frequent hauntings of her.
• Card-Carrying Villain: He is fully aware that he is the antagonist of the story Alan finds himself trapped in and is downright touched when a review of American Nightmare calls him "pure evil". While he has embraced it nominally to fill the goals of the Dark Presence and for his own pleasure, it is suggested he resents never having the choice to be anything else because of this.
• The Casanova: Due to the good looks granted to him, and the extra mental influence if need be, he ends up being quite popular with the women of Night Springs. We see or hear of at least three who were attracted to him naturally, which he more than took advantage of for his own ends.
• Climax Boss: His second and final boss fight against Saga in Alan Wake II is a suitably tense encounter and the last Taken boss of the game. It is also only the start of the endgame, which continues with far more cerebral gameplay sequences. Ultimately, his final defeat once again comes during the final cutscene.
• Cloudcuckoolander: He seems to genuinely believe that a potted plant has the capacity to write a new story for him to star in, as he recruits one for his meager writing team in the Sales Trailer.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • Unlike the Dark Presence, who interacted with Alan sparingly and was humorless, Mr. Scratch talks to Alan frequently (especially if the player seeks out the TV sets) and has a much more casual and humorous demeanor. Alan also notes that while the Dark Presence wasn't very creative, Mr. Scratch's Taken are much more aggressive and distinct. However, II states that Mr. Scratch and the Dark Presence are in fact more or less interchangeable.
  • The sequel also has Scratch contrast himself, specifically his portrayal in American Nightmare. Unlike the cheerful, charismatic psychopath who gleefully taunted Alan throughout the game, Scratch in II is a deadly serious, feral, raging monster who shows up sparingly and is terrifyingly efficient with getting what he wants. It's heavily implied that Alan's defeat of him in American Nightmare is what caused this change in behavior.
• Crazy-Prepared: In II, Scratch corrupts Casey as a backup host in the event he is purged from Alan, long before he is at risk of such a fate. This allows Scratch to get the drop on Saga, allowing him to steal the Clicker from her.
• Cutscene Boss: You don't fight him physically at any point throughout American Nightmare, and he goes down only during the ending cutscene.
• Darker and Edgier: His hammy, Laughably Evil persona has been completely removed in Alan Wake II. Instead he's a screaming and barely-coherent force that manifests like a hurricane, usually with an appropriate body count. It is suggested he became a far more direct extension of the Dark Presence after his first defeat. There's also the fact that he's been trapped in the Dark Place just as long as Alan has, so he's probably long since lost all patience he may or may not have once had, and is now 100% focused on getting results rather than enjoying himself. He does retain a few aspects of his former personality, though, such as getting utterly shitfaced with Tom Zane while brainstorming story ideas, taking Jaakko Koskela's biker jacket for himself after killing him for seemingly no reason other than he thought it looked good, and his ideal version of Bright Falls being a never-ending Deerfest where everyone showers him and his new book with glowing praise.
• Dead Person Impersonation: He reveals his master plan for Alice is to be this: show up pretending to be Alan Back from the Dead and be a loving husband for as long as he can manage before killing her when she finally notices something's wrong. Or whenever he feels like it.
• Death by Irony: The guy who loves being the center of attention and constantly talks to Alan through the TVs he finds along the way... dies from a camera being pointed at him and turned on.
• Death Glare: Save for briefly interspersed moments where he is seen shrieking with rage and the occasional Slasher Smile, a focused, hateful glare is the only expression on his face throughout Alan Wake II. In the final scene, he affixes an absolutely murderous one on Saga when he realizes the story doesn't work out in his favor.
• Demonic Possession: In Alan Wake II, this has become his modus operandi ever since his brush with death in American Nightmare, having since forsaken a physical appearance in favour of directly taking over Alan instead. After he's forced out of Wake by Saga and the FBC, Scratch takes Agent Casey as a replacement host until he's exorcised a short while later with the Clicker.
• Deranged Dance: The third of his recordings in American Nightmare just features him dancing around with a knife in his hand without even acknowledging Alan. His insanity is underscored by him not stopping the dance to deliver a Finishing Stomp on a Not Quite Dead unseen victim.
• Desperately Craves Affection: Hoooo boy. It's extemely telling that Scratch's default response to just about any interaction with another person in American Nightmare that isn't just killing them for kicks is to try and get them to pay as much attention to him and flatter him as much as possible, which he even tries to do with Alan in one of the videos he leaves before the party next door to him pisses him off into abandoning it. He's fully capable of using his powers to wreak havoc on the world around him, but frequently only bothers to use it to make the people he meets worship him or to desire him.
• Diligent Hero, Slothful Villain:
  • Sloth proves to be his Fatal Flaw throughout American Nightmare. While Alan works like hell to find a way out of Night Springs, Mr. Scratch idles and murders random people while letting the Taken do the work in killing Alan. This backfires when Alan succeeds due to his diligence, and Mr. Scratch is (seemingly) destroyed once he finally decides to do something about it himself.
  • Inverted in II. Alan, exhausted by his numerous escape attempts and increasingly wary of the havoc his stories might be wreaking in the real world, decides to give up writing completely and stay sealed under Cauldron Lake along with the Dark Presence. Unfortunately, Scratch takes advantage of this lapse to write an entire novel of his own without any counter-edits from Alan, tilting the balance of power completely in Scratch's favor.
• Disappears into Light: He slowly dissolves piece by piece into light when he is hit by the movie projector, allowing him time for some frantic last words before he is dissolved completely.
• Disproportionate Retribution: While speaking to Alan via TV in the observatory, the guy in the next room begins getting on his nerves. It's heavily implied he strangled the poor bastard.
  Scratch: ... Nevermind...
• Does Not Like Guns: Because killing someone slowly and painfully with a knife is much more enjoyable and satisfying than just shooting them.
• The Dragon: Alan makes an informed guess that Mr. Scratch probably doesn't have his own agenda, but rather works as an agent for one of the many Eldritch Abominations that lurks in the Dark Place. In Alan Wake II, he's effectively synonymous with the Dark Presence itself, just twisted by Alan's worst excesses.
• The Dreaded: As Alan falls further into madness from being trapped, he begins to grow fearful at the thought of Scratch coming back for him. In Alan Wake II, he sounds downright manic as he talks about his double to Saga.
• Early-Bird Cameo: His first appearance at the end of Alan Wake is this, given how short his appearance is and how vague Zane is about him. He gets some more substantial appearances beginning with American Nightmare which delves into his character and motivation.
• Emotion Bomb: His constant, undiluted rage in II is described as so powerful and single-minded it seeps into the minds of the Taken he leads toward the Dark Ocean Summoning, filling them with his sadistic glee as they attack Saga at the foot of Cauldron Lake.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor:
  • He treats some of the things he does like they're simply cruel-minded pranks, most prominently with the female fan. He hides in the bathroom and invites Alan to watch like it's a Jackass bit as he sneaks up behind her and slits her throat, before laughing like it's the funniest thing in the world.
  • In II, the Dark Place Echo of Casey says this trope basically verbatim when he found out the killer in the hotel who was playing the devil, implied to be Scratch, asked to stay in Room 666.
  Casey: The devil had a sense of humor, or he really didn't. It was funny either way.
• Evil Gloating: Frequently, particularly in his video messages to Alan, whether thrilled over a recent kill, showing off his weapons or contemplating how easily he'll manage a Kill and Replace due to his superiority.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • In the Super Effective Sales Trailer, he goes to Remedy's offices, kills people with a sledgehammer, stuffs their bodies in a freezer, and enslaves Sam Lake to write for him. He also steals candy, rides a scooter around in the halls, flips off a picture of Alan, and enslaves a potted plant to write for him.
  • Even more so in Alan Wake II, because it turns out the crux of his scheme to overtake the world is... to become more popular.
  • His draft of Return focuses especially on torturing and corrupting Cynthia Weaver, possibly because she was one of Alan's key allies in the original game.
• Evil Tastes Good: He describes the most terrible, evil things he can think of as "Sweet", accompanied by rolling-eyes and a face slack with pleasure from just contemplating it.
• Evil Doppelgänger: He's exactly what Alan would be if he was evil. Though he's a Humanoid Abomination variation on an Enemy Without, wearing the protagonist's shape to manipulate events in service of a larger Eldritch Abomination, his roots in Alan's psyche mean he's hopeful of attempting a Kill and Replace.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: He's the Evil to the Dark Presence's Oblivion, seeking to keep the world around as his playground and to be renowned as the greatest author of all time as "Alan", as opposed to the Dark Presence taking everything, and ultimately turning on it. This makes him more of a threat, because he understands humans, and he's far more patient and willing to accept setbacks; after all, the world will be around if he wins or loses, so even if one scheme fails, he is still able to enjoy himself while prepping for the next one.
• Expy: Of Dale Cooper's Doppelganger, the similarly named Mr. C. Both are physically identical copies of the protagonist with a sadistic streak (especially toward women) who go out of their way to ruin the reputation of their counterpart while they are missing. II's reimagining of Scratch even has him physically resemble Mr. C on account of his Barbarian Long Hair and leather jacket.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: An identical copy of the attractive Alan, which he milks for all its worth with the writer's female fanbase, but a sadistic killer who varies in method between a composed and elegant serial killer and a screaming maniac throughout his appearances.
• Fatal Flaw: In American Nightmare, it is lack of foresight. His desire to do everything in the moment based on what amuses him backfires when he comes up with a half-baked plan to torture Alan. While in theory an endless time loop is a good method to torment him, he failed to realize he himself was trapped in the loop, meaning he dooms himself to a battle he can't even win through attrition.
• Faux Affably Evil: He feigns pleasantness when he wants his victims to be off guard or he's pretending to be the real Alan. In the end, though, there is never anything genuine behind that smile.
• Fights Like a Normal: He has the powers of the Dark Presence at his disposal, meaning he could have most of his victims very quickly Taken to be his minions. Instead, he prefers to use man-made tools for his murders, as he notes the importance of a connection when being professional about his work. This extends to the second game. When Mr. Scratch fights Saga while he will occasionally throw a wave of darkness at her, his primary method of attacking is swinging a club at her.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He is somewhat responsible for the AWE DLC in Control. His haunting of Alice made her to seek the FBC for help. Her presence there was sensed by Hartman who broke free of his confinement, forcing the FBC to abandon the entire sector he was in.
• Hammy Villain, Serious Hero: Scratch is loud, arrogant, and frequently showboats due to a near compulsive need to be acknowledged by others. On the other hand, his main victim Alan develops into a somber and lowkey guy after all his experiences in the Dark Place and dutifully works to escape his prison.
• Happy Ending Override: He's implied to have done an In-Universe version of this after he edits "Return", as many of Alan's allies seem worse off in the second game than in the first. For example:
  • Alice was repeatedly tormented by visions of Scratch. While she wasn't Driven to Suicide like many feared, she ultimately decided to return to the Dark Place to help Alan escape.
  • While Odin and Tor were originally put in the Valhalla Nursing Home as a favor from Barry to live out the rest of their lives in comfortable retirement, by the second game they're slowly wasting away both physically and mentally without any purpose to live for and the Dark Presence's corrupting influence on them certainly isn't helping.
  • Cynthia Weaver eventually lost her sanity from the responsibility and burden of being the Lady of the Light, and is eventually drowned in her own bathtub by Mr. Scratch in a moment of weakness.
  • Pat Maine can be heard in his radio show rapidly spiraling into dementia regarding his ardent belief that Wendy Davis is still alive, possibly caused by meddling from Mr. Scratch.
• The Heartless: He's a living embodiment of all the nasty rumors that have circulated about Alan given his celebrity.
• The Hedonist: Everything he does is in the name of fulfilling his own sick idea of pleasure. Ironically, the only thing that doesn't seem actively thrilled to do is the very reason for his creation, to get the Dark Presence out of its cage (which he admits doesn't take precedence in his plans, because his "work" with Alan is just too fun to finish quickly).
• Hellbent For Leather: Takes on this style of dress in the second game. In his first appearance in the real world, he claims Jaakko's leather jacket for himself with the same connotations of an Evil Costume Switch, and it's the outfit he (and Alan after him) wear for the rest of the game.
• Hidden Depths: One video has him oddly subdued but clearly agitated. He opens up to Alan, since they're so much alike being doppelgangers, and mentions that the fact of his existence is extremely disturbing to himself. He tries several times to ask Alan for help and to work together, but he literally can't get the words out. For whatever reason, Mr. Scratch was trying to reach out to Alan, possibly because as a doppelganger, he still has Alan's inherent goodness, and can't quite reconcile it with his evil nature. Of course, he then goes off to kill the guy in the next room for being too loud, so... he's not that good. Either that or the noise snapped him out of his moment of clarity.
• Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": In Alan Wake II, it's revealed that this is partly what he represents; the impulse for Alan to recreate himself as a god who is able to do everything he wants, whenever and however, and for people to love him no matter how sociopathic he gets. At its core, the story of the sequel is his attempt to hijack Alan's attempts to escape to effectively turn the planet into his Self-Insert Fic where he is at the center of everything in a gloating living power fantasy, as shown by his Bad Future world which resembles an eternal Deerfest where everyone loves Alan.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: His plans in both American Nightmare and II revolve around a Time Loop Trap he either starts or helps to perpetuate to torment his foes while furthering his goals. Both times this backfires on him, with the time loop being turned around and Scratch being just as trapped and the heroes gaining an upper hand because of it.
• Humanoid Abomination: He might be a new avatar for the Dark Presence. When Barbara Jagger drowned, it took on her appearance and was able to move about the world much like Mr. Scratch. She was also known as "The Scratching Hag" around Bright Falls.
• Hypocrite: In the Super Effective Sales Trailer, he earnestly agrees with a negative review of American Nightmare when it derides Alan and his dress choice for being goofy. It immediately cuts to him riding a scooter around, still wearing a dignified three piece suit.
• Implacable Man: As the Dark Presence's avatar and Alan's personal tormentor, he's completely relentless in his quest to escape the Dark Place. Not only is he near-impervious to harm, he also comes back whenever Alan tries to kill him through more esoteric means like in American Nightmare. The sequel makes it clear that he and Alan are locked in an editing war on Alan's attempts to write himself out of the Dark Place, with Scratch literally scratching out Alan's passages whenever he makes progress. When Alan eventually tries to Take a Third Option and give up writing entirely to keep them both sealed beneath the lake, Scratch just shifts his attention to Thomas Zane and coerces him into helping Scratch escape instead.
• It's Personal: After Alan almost kills him at the end of American Nightmare, he gets a lot more aggressive and no-nonsense in his torment of him and his family. Due to how important he sees himself, the hit to his ego from being defeated was as personal as he could have made it and put him into an rage for over a decade.
• Just Between You and Me: He really loves doing this. Throughout the entirety of American Nightmare he leaves TV recordings strewn about to further mock Alan, reveal a new evil plan he's cooked up, or just record a killing he's been planning, all under the assumption Alan can do nothing but bear it and watch until he fails to complete the loop.
• Kick the Dog: Good lord, he's basically a dog-kicking machine. Just when you think he's finally topped himself, Alan turns on another TV and Mr. Scratch finds some new way to get under Alan's (as well as the player's) skin.
• Knight of Cerebus: When compared to his Laughably Evil persona in “American Nightmare”, he is this in spades in II. Any levity in a scene disappears whenever he’s mentioned and once he finally makes a physical appearance, the game becomes a race against time to stop him.
• Large Ham: You wouldn't think it, given he shares the same voice and mo-cap actor with the rather down-to-earth Alan Wake. However, it's clear Ilkka Villi and Matthew Porretta enjoyed themselves as Mr. Scratch. A lot.
• Laughably Evil: Despite all his nastiness, his commentary is actually pretty entertaining. The complete dissonance between his monstrous actions and unrelenting joviality lead to most of his appearances having a gut buster in it, usually following some form of violence. Averted with a vengeance in II, which excises his Faux Affably Evil and Large Ham traits in favor of portraying him as a full-on Knight of Cerebus by way of being an unrelenting maelstrom of malevolence.
• Looks Like Jesus: Befitting his Dark Messiah traits in the second game, he is still an exact double to Alan, who now sports a scraggy beard and longer brown hair, giving him a distinct resemblance to the son of God.
• Meaningful Name: Mr. Scratch, otherwise known as Old Scratch, is one of the Devil's pseudonyms, which came from the Middle English word "scrat" or Old Norse word "skratte"; both can mean either goblin or demon. This is spelled out by a conversation about Scratch's play in Alan Wake II.
  Ed: Some of the crew started to joke we had hired the devil to play himself.
  Casey: Mr. Scratch as the devil. He was born to play the role.
• Monster Misogyny: While Mr. Scratch has no trouble killing men, the majority of his victims seem to be women with a special attention to degrading them like using his powers to make one Brainwashed and Crazy into loving him. He also stalks Alan's wife, Alice, and makes numerous threats to her to Alan. He retains this trait in II, in which he calls Saga a "fucking cow" when demanding the Clicker after revealing himself, and when fighting her, most of his Boss Banter has him snarling out "You bitch!" as he tries to beat her to death with a steel bar.
• Near-Villain Victory: By the end of Alan Wake II, he succeeds in his goals. He writes a story that gives him a way out of the Dark Place, gets his hands on the Clicker to corrupt reality, and even separates himself physically from Alan. If not for Alan's sacrifice and timely intervention from Rose and Ahti, the Downer Ending he penned would have come to fruition.
• No-Sell: The power of light is even less effective in the second game than in American Nightmare. Flares and flashlight charges fail to slow him down at all, and a spotlight beam only briefly incapacitates him, to the point if he isn't stunned by gunfire before exposure to it, he will simply teleport out of the way.
• Non-Action Big Bad: For all his boasts and taunts, all he ever bothers to do is send hordes of Taken after Alan rather than try to deal with him directly. Even his victims are all either tied up and helpless or taken by surprise. Averted in Alan Wake II, where he is a suitably tough final boss.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Mr. Scratch's lack of agenda makes him even more dangerous. Control reveals that Mr. Scratch is still in the real world, apparently stalking Alice. He also might be taking the form of something that appears to be Thomas Zane but beyond that, his whereabouts and plans are unknown. To make matters worse, the FBC have no idea of his existence.
• Offing the Annoyance: Instantly turns Jaakko into a pile of gore in the Bright Falls prison for insulting him, despite the fact Jaakko was also locked in a separate prison cell and completely unable to even inconvenience Scratch.
• Ominous Walk: Never breaks into a run in his pursuit of Saga, only powerwalking toward her and making use of a Flash Step to close especially large gaps. He does the same in Casey's body while chasing Alan through the grounds of the Valhalla Nursing Home, mirroring the Dark Presence pursuing Wake in the Initiation chapters.
• Only One Name: He is only ever named Scratch, without indication on whether it is a first name or last. Though due to the nature of his creation meaning he was never born, "Mr." is just as much a part of his name as it is an honorific.
• The Pawns Go First: A page of the Return manuscript confirms he leads the hordes of Taken attacking the Dark Ocean Summoning from the beginning, but lets his undead army attack first to wear Saga down.
• Pipe Pain: In Alan Wake II, with no access to his trademark bladed weaponry and with an increased level of sadism, he rips an iron pipe off a prison bar and takes to beating Saga with it. He even hangs onto the same pipe for their second encounter later in the night.
• Poke in the Third Eye: After their first encounter, Saga gets the option to try and profile Scratch to find out his motives there and then. Her attempt is thwarted by Scratch noticing this and immediately trying to wrench control of the Mind Place from her, even briefly taking over her seat the way the Anderson brothers do to talk with her.
• Poke the Poodle:
  • The plan he thinks up for Barry is far less impressive than most of his other endeavors. He intends to keep him alive to fire him and see how poorly he takes it afterward for a laugh.
  • In the Sales trailer, after slaughtering his way through Remedy's offices and making a mess of the place in the process, he starts to fill his pockets with stolen candy. He even looks around nervously while does it and genuinely seems afraid to be caught in the act.
• Psycho Knife Nut: Prefers to kill with knives, because he doesn't believe that he can truly "connect" with people by using bullets. In one video, he even shows off his specialized collection and gives a rundown on the best ways to use the different blades.
• Psychopathic Manchild: One of his primary character traits as a tulpa created from all of Alan's worst attributes in both American Nightmare and II. He's extremely immature, impulsive, and desperately craves attention from just about anyone willing to give it to him, even Alan, whom he despises for having had a life that Scratch can never have himself. The Super-Effective Sales Trailer highlights this trait extremely well, with Scratch taking over and slaughtering Remedy's staff... all so that he can read compliments about himself off of their slide projector, steal their food, and make a potted plant write a story for him.
• Rage Against the Author: Promotional material depicts him killing Sam Lake in one video, and enslaving him in another after going on a killing spree throughout Remedy's offices.
• Reality Warper: By the time of Alan Wake II, he took advantage of the Writer's Room while Wake was away to write up a story for his own purposes, which affects the real world as his cult at his novel's center forms in the real world to menace the area around Bright Falls.
• Recurring Boss: He is fought twice throughout Alan Wake II, once outside the Sheriff's Station at the end of "Scratch", and the second time next to Cauldron Lake at the climax of the Dark Ocean Summoning. In both cases, the strategy to defeat him is largely the same, only with Saga needing to coordinate his being stunned by Estevez with light throughout the second fight.
• Red Baron: Referred to as the "Herald of Darkness" by the Old Gods of Asgard, in contrast to Alan's title as the "Champion of Light".
• Same Character, But Different: No longer a Sharp-Dressed Man, Laughably Evil, or Faux Affably Evil by the time of Alan Wake II, on top of having become a far more calculating and loyal servant of the Dark Presence. Only his egotism and Shadow Archetype traits from American Nightmare are retained. Given that he is exclusively referred to as "Scratch" and lacks the prefix of "Mr.", there is an implication that Scratch is something of a different entity altogether. Particularly since Mr. Scratch appears to be able to act separately from Alan, while Scratch appears to be an Enemy Within, particularly when Alan finally escapes the Dark Place in II.
• Same Language Dub: He's physically played by Ilkka Villi just as Alan is, and due to Villi's natural heavy accent at the time not matching a native New Yorker, he and his double are dubbed over by actor Matthew Porretta.
• Sanity Slippage: He was already a gleefully homicidal maniac in American Nightmare where he takes sadistic pleasure in murdering anyone he came across, but by the time of Alan Wake II, he's lost what little sanity he had in the years since his defeat at Alan's hands at Night Springs, losing his once jovial demeanor and becoming consumed with a constantly bloodthirsty rage towards everyone around him to the point that he comes off more like a feral animal.
• Satanic Archetype:
  • He's an embodiment of all of Alan's more evil qualities (both real and imagined) who desires nothing more to escape the Hellish realm that spawned him so that he could wreak havoc on the Earthly plane. He's a master manipulator and a corrupting influence, motivated entirely by his own Pride (a trait typically associated with Lucifer in theology and demonology) and his own petty amusement, partakes in demonic possession, plays god with the power of Cauldron Lake and his ideal world has him worshipped by a humanity robbed of its free will. Even his name is a reference to "Old Scratch", an old nickname for Satan.
  • The satanic comparison is even lampshaded in Alan Wake II, where Mr. Scratch as a character in Initiation is written as a Dark Messiah to a Mystery Cult who believe him to be the Devil on the Earthly plane. He even stays in room 666 for extra irony (note that he specifically asks to stay in that particular room).
• Selective Obliviousness: As the Super Effective Sales trailer demonstrates, he's more or less aware of the fact he's in a video game as he Breaks the Fourth Wall and runs through various reviews of American Nightmare in Remedy Studios. Somehow, when the subject of his actor comes up, he is at an uncharacteristic confusion and loss for words before simply moving on like nothing happened.
  Scratch: Ilkka what? Who the hell?
• Serial Killer: He goes around killing as many people as he can whenever he isn't distracting himself with taunting Alan. Throughout American Nightmare, he goes out of his way to record himself claiming at least 3 victims, with many more mentioned or suggested.
• Shadow Archetype: As stated above, he's essentially Alan without any of the moral shackles that kept him from straying into insanity, as well as having no people to show him support or care while stopping him from making bad decisions. He even outright admits that lack of control is exactly what he wants.
• Slasher Smile: One of his most noted features whenever he's in a good mood. Whenever he isn't, and the smile drops, it's an even worse sign.
• Small Role, Big Impact: In the AWE expansion he makes no actual appearance and is only obliquely referenced, but his haunting of Alice inspired her to go to the FBC, which caused the disaster of the Investigations Department when the The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman sensed her presence and went berserk enough to escape.
• Superpowered Evil Side: While Alan is still a normal guy with realistically limited physical capabilities, when Scratch overtakes his body, he suddenly becomes completely Immune to Bullets, strong enough to effectively fight by beating his enemies to death, and mainly unaffected by the Taken's weakness to light, making him one of the most dangerous single paranatural entities seen in the franchise.
• Super-Toughness: Even without a Darkness shield, any body he possesses becomes supernaturally impervious to all damage. No matter how many bullets Saga pumps into Wake's body during Scratch's boss fights, Alan wakes up without a scratch on him when Scratch is forced out.
• Take Over the World: His end goal with the Return manuscript in Alan Wake II. Starting from Bright Falls, the Dark Presence's influence will envelop the world into a reality where everyone is obsessed with Alan and his books and be completely subservient to his whims.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: He knows and relates to Alan that the method of his creation left him ham-fistedly and unrepentantly evil. While he seems to resent this to some extent, he's made the choice that to differentiate himself from Alan, he'll embrace his hard-coded feelings that Evil Feels Good and double down on the role.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Alan Wake II, his ambitions and powers expand beyond just a small town to the entire planet, and he becomes way more tactical about it. This also applies to his physical ability, as luring him into an FBC containment unit lined with Black Rock and illuminated by multiple spotlights only makes him blow them all up. FBC Agent Estevez outright says that no Paranatural Entity the FBC encountered before has that kind of power.
• Tulpa: He is a being formed as a single amalgamation of every nasty rumor people spread about Alan during his stardom and after his disappearance. True to its powerset, the Dark Presence was unable to make anything new, so it ripped pieces of thought from others until it produced something resembling originality.
• Uncertain Doom: Alan's final gambit in the second game seems to kill him to some extent, but it also starts up a (near) Stable Time Loop to the start of the entire ordeal. Given Alan's final narration, it seems Scratch has the capacity to come back as long as the "spiral" persists, but enough changes can be made over time to change the story and stop him from following Alan out of the Dark Place. In "The Final Draft", with the completion of the loop, Alan asserts that Scratch is "gone" from his head but never makes it clear what becomes of him otherwise.
• Unexplained Recovery:
  • He seemed to have been disintegrated by the movie Alan plays at the end of American Nightmare. Instead, when the AWE expansion released, it was revealed he somehow recuperated offscreen and continued his work to make Alan's life hell far more seriously while Alan's mind degraded.
  • It's noteworthy, though not explicitly stated, that unlike in American Nightmare, by II he seems unable to manifest physically in a separate, humanoid body from Alan, unless he possesses someone else like he does Casey. In II and Control he's also seemingly only able to appear to Alice in brief flashes and hallucinations. So it can be inferred that this change to his corporeality is a result of his first defeat killing his body but not his mind.
• The Unpronounceable: Any attempt by Alan to speak his double's name out loud results in "Scratch" getting censored by a scratchy static noise. Oddly, no one else suffers from this problem, and even Alan no longer does by the time of II.
• "The Villain Sucks" Song: Is the subject of the song "Yötön Yö" performed by Ahti in Watery as well as in the film of the same name.
• Villain Teleportation: When he arrives to confront Alan throughout Night Springs, he does so by teleporting in through a cloud of darkness, and he also leaves the same way. He later utilizes the Teleport Spam style while chasing after Saga.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Over the course of American Nightmare, his gloating becomes more and more transparently pathetic, as if trying to reassert dominance rather than actually having it, to the point that Alan points it out in the final loop. He really falls apart into full-blown panic when he is about to die, screaming that it was his life now.
  Mr. Scratch: What? What is this?! No! No! You can't do this! All I did was take the things you always wanted but never had the balls to go for! It's my turn now! It's my life! It's my life!
  • By Alan Wake II, it's clear that his defeat at Night Springs and the following decade has stripped away all pretense of sanity he ever had, spending every moment of his screen time locked in a barely-coherent psychotic rage. It gets even worse towards the end, as he realizes that Alan and Saga have stolen his victory away from him, affixing Saga with a murderous Death Glare before she shoots him in Alan's body.
• We Can Rule Together: As he pursues Alan through the Wellness center in Casey's body, he can be heard beckoning this to him. He claims that while the changed reality is what he deserves, it is also what Alan truly wants, and if he just stopped running they could share the glory. Alan doesn't take the bait.
• Weakened by the Light: As it turns out, he can't withstand the light too much better than the common Taken he sends after you. As he himself mentions, small motel lights and things like that are apparently fine, but anything close to a floodlight and he's toast.
• Weaksauce Weakness: In Alan Wake II he, like all other standard Taken, is susceptible to "Another Headshot", the weapon upgrade that causes Taken to be stunned for longer after consecutive headshots from Saga's pistol. Said ability is enforced by a torn up manuscript page, but it is nonetheless surprising.

The Taken / Shaded Individuals

Appearances: Alan Wake | Alan Wake's American Nightmare | Control | Alan Wake II

"This story is a monster!"

^{Click here to see the Taken in Alan Wake:}"OMEGA 3 FATTY ACIDS ARE GOOD FOR YOUR HEART!"

"The Taken stood before me. It was impossible to focus on it, as if it stood in a blind spot caused by a brain tumor or an eye disease. It was bleeding shadows like ink underwater, like a cloud of blood from a shark bite."

—Alan Wake, Wake Fights a Taken with Light

Humans who were forcibly corrupted and possessed by the Dark Presence, turned into lifeless husks who mingle into the darkness at night in order to surround and attack targets, Alan especially. They're the Dark Presence's foot soldiers in a sense, the only remnant of their former selves being their random quotes, which tie to the Taken's previous occupation as a human.

---

In General

• And I Must Scream: Once a person is Taken, they are trapped in their own mind and tormented by the Dark Presence as their bodies are used as meat puppets.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Most of the Taken in Alan Wake II's real world have "Source Points"; small glowing red spots somewhere along their body. If Saga shoots this point dead on, the Taken will be massively injured and easier to kill.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Those Taken by the Dark Presence reveal themselves to have these when their shroud is burned off.
• Body Horror: They suffer varying degrees of this. The basic Taken only have Black Eyes of Evil and have blotchy dead-looking skin. The more powerful Taken have their bodies swollen to such a size any normal person would collapse under their own weight.
  • Alan Wake II also doubles down on the gory side of this, as they can have chunks removed by gunfire and keep coming despite their crippling injuries.
• The Brute: Assault Taken are bigger, stronger, and not even particularly slower compared to their Flanker counterparts.
• Chainsaw Good: The strongest Assault Taken in Alan Wake haul around chainsaws to fight against Alan. On the hardest difficulties, they have the capacity to score a One-Hit Kill.
• Death of Personality: If a person is Taken by the darkness, this is their inevitable fate. Their bodies might still resemble their old selves, but the people they once were are completely gone.
• Dumb Muscle: Although they’re not completely stupid, the Taken as a whole are very single-minded and simple creatures, heavily relying on human wave attacks and possessing little initiative beyond the orders of the dark force controlling them. It even reflects on their choice of weaponry, as it is explicitly stated that the Taken prefer melee weapons because of how easy they are to use.
• Empty Shell: A manuscript page talks in a little more detail about what the Taken actually are, and it essentially boils down to this trope. They're husks of the human beings they once were, mere shells with the basic faces and appearance of their old selves, with their personalities and memories dead and buried underneath the darkness. Their dialogue is basically like a corpse's twitch, a go-to response from their bodies in relation to what they once were.
• Enemy Without: There's an implication that the shades Alan faces in II are manifestations of his negative emotions and (at times) madness. Their lines are taken straight from one of the videos Alan finds near the end of the game that shows him from another loop ranting and raving, having gone completely mad. So essentially, the shades are repeating Alan's own words back to him in a distorted voice.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Their voices all begin to fluctuate between unnaturally deep and agonizingly shrill once they are Taken. They stay completely in the "deep" vocal range in Alan Wake II.
• Fragile Speedster: Flankers, smaller Taken that move fast and circle around Alan in an attempt to surround him before attacking. Take away their protection and they'll go down in a single bullet from the handgun.
• Humanoid Abomination: They're animated husks of what were once human workers in different fields, spouting out random nonsense related to their previous occupations and serving the Dark Presence as its personalized attack force.
• It Can Think: While they seem to have devolved into animalistic base functions, they still have the capacity to use tools and lead people into ambushes by waiting near a distant light and attacking those lured to it. By the sequel, some of the Taken are now seen using firearms.
• Living Shadow: The darkness now coats them and makes them resemble this, actual shadowy figures haunting the area around Bright Falls like phantoms out of a horror story. Said cover also makes them invulnerable to harm unless it's removed with a light source like Alan's flashlight.
  • In Alan Wake II, some of the Taken of the Dark Place look far more like shadows, and only take human shape when the light is burned away. Some are only shadows, and simply dissipate when their outer layer is given light.
• Making a Splash: The Taken Divers can summon up a torrent of Darkness infused water to throw at Saga.
• Men Are Generic, Women Are Special: All of the standard Taken people we fight throughout the first two games are men. The only Taken women we see, Barbara Jagger, controls far more power as the direct Avatar of the Dark Presence. This changes in Alan Wake II, where there are several Taken women.
• Mirror Monster: The appearance of the Taken Diver is an elderly Taken that reflects at the midsection, giving them the appearance of a multiarmed monster with A Head at Each End.
• Mook: To the Dark Presence, naturally, coming in different varieties and categories in order to hurt Alan and give the player a harder time, with the average Taken filling the role of basic mook, taking two pistol shots to be defeated;
  • Flankers are smaller, faster Taken that will run towards Alan and circle him in large numbers to deal consecutive damage, but their protection is small and so is their health, being easily dispatched with single pistol shots;
  • Tele-Flankers are even faster than normal Flankers, moving so fast they become motion blurs amidst the darkness;
  • Assaults are the heavyset Taken with heavy weapons at their disposal, taking a lot of punishment before going down. The Chainsaw Assaults are also capable of killing Alan in one swing and can regenerate their darkness protection when they stop taking damage.
• No Body Left Behind: Once they are killed, they dissipate into darkness without a trace of their corpse. Zig-Zagged come Alan Wake II, when the Taken in the real world now leave the corpse behind, but Taken in the Dark Place still fade away once killed.
• No Object Permanence: The reason given they still leave the protagonists alone in Safe Rooms and bright enough light despite their stronger immunity to it: they can no longer see Alan or Saga when in those lights, and thus instantly stop acknowledging them until they come back into their view.
• Non-Malicious Monster: In Alan Wake II, some of the Taken will simply not attack Alan and let him pass unharmed. Unfortunately, they are interspaced with Taken who will attack and grow aggressive if Wake attacks them, meaning they simply up the Paranoia Fuel.
• Non Sequitur: Due to the nature of their possession, they yell out random things which were at one point connected to their lives. This ranges from a police man yelling out stock phrases to a lumberjack growling about lunchboxes while he tries to put an axe through your head.
  • Alan Wake II instead has the Taken recite lines from Alan's changed manuscript, with the named Taken bosses saying the ones written precisely about themselves.
• Our Zombies Are Different: With a lack of classical zombies in the RCU, the Taken fill their traditional place. They are pale undead with an animalistic desire to kill humans, but are the envoys of an Eldritch Abomination, have the capacity to use tools in a basic way, and have a weakness to light.
• Painfully Slow Projectile: One of their new abilities in Alan Wake II is to conjure up a massive homing Darkness bomb and send it floating toward Alan. It is slow enough he can outrun it for a time, and they can be destroyed prior to detonation with use of the flashlight.
• Stealthy Mook: A few groups of Taken in the Special Episodes are invisible until their darkness shields are burned away. The effect is not perfect, meaning Alan can use their Predator-esque outline to uncover them.
• Teleport Spam: A Taken variation in Alan Wake II, similar to the Tele-Flanker of the original, makes itself harder to hit by rapidly teleporting both away from Saga and Alan's gunfire and toward them to close the distance to attack.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Alan Wake II even the standard Taken are far more resistant to gunfire and sunlight, and hit harder against Saga. Some have also developed special abilities, such as splitting into two or regenerating their Darkness shields to make themselves more dangerous.
• Tragic Monster: Most of them were innocent people caught at the wrong time late at night and turned into monsters. Doubly so for those who Alan met prior to their being Taken and he failed to save, despite his efforts.
• Was Once a Man: All of them were at one point normal humans, but being consumed by the Dark Presence twisted them into shadowed puppets to be manipulated.
• Weakened by the Light: They all have a protective barrier of darkness enveloping them that protects them from weaponry and gunfire. Light is their weakness as the only thing that can burn it away, and once it is completely dissolved they can be gunned down.
• Weapons of Their Trade: Many of them are formerly lumberjacks, farmers, and hikers out on the outskirts of town, explaining why the majority of them prefer axes and sickles for use as their Improvised Weapon.

Imaginary Barry

"Barry Wheeler"

Portrayed by: Fred Berman

Appearances: Alan Wake

"Alan, baby, relax. Let's try to stay on the ball here."

A mental construct of Barry Wheeler who helps Alan throughout the DLC episodes. He's even more annoying than the real Barry, despite being Alan's sole companion in the Dark Place for the DLCs besides Thomas Zane.

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• Big Bad Friend: Downplayed, but he does repeatedly sneak in a few jabs in his dialogue with Alan, repeatedly reminding him of past screw-ups. At the very end of "The Writer", he finally just goes fully aggressive and tries to kill Alan's rational half.
• Captain Obvious: He tends to talk about things Alan (and the audience) knows about already. Both Alan and himself lampshade this by pointing out his knowledge is limited to Alan's own, since he's a product of the latter's imagination.
• Final Boss: Of "The Writer", as well as effectively being this for both the bonus DLC episodes and the original game.
• Flunky Boss: During the battle with him, not only does he summon Taken versions of people Alan's seen before (Hartman and the Anderson brothers), he'll also be repeatedly flanked by Ravens.
• Flanderization: Deliberate, since this is only a depiction of Barry in Alan's mind, so he comes across as what Alan would perceive Barry to be at his most basic, an annoying talkative Motor Mouth that only ever states the obvious. It's possible that this is due to the years the two spent together as agent and client, since he still acts friendly towards Alan despite this... until the end.
• Imaginary Friend: As both the two DLC episodes are the Dark Place intermingled with Alan's mind, he serves as a thought up manifestation of Alan's old friend made to keep him focused on getting himself back in control.
• King Mook: When he is finally confronted, fittingly for the very last enemy fought in Alan Wake, he swaps through all of the various behaviors of the Taken during his fight with Alan. This is also coupled with various Raven flocks and the strongest Darkness shield in the game.
• Marathon Boss: He just doesn't give up when he finally tries to kill Alan, shifting between different Taken modes (at least four) and summoning Taken versions of other characters, all while trying to fight Alan's desire to abandon him.
• The Pawns Go First: When fighting him, he gets one brief taste of Alan's flashlight before retreating and sending out the imaginary depictions of Dr. Hartman and the Anderson brothers, all of them as Tele-Flanker Taken, to fight for him first before going back into the fray himself.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: As he first starts blocking Alan's way on the path to the Bird Leg Cabin he snarls out a one-liner as he twirls his axe:
  Barry: Here we go, I'm earning my 15 percent commission!
• Rule of Symbolism: At the end of "The Writer", right before he turns on Alan and attacks him, the Christmas lights and headlamp Barry wore against the Taken vanish, thus leaving Barry's image metaphorically "exposed" to the Dark Presence in Alan's mind and letting him be Taken.
• Token Good Teammate: For most of the DLC episodes he serves as this to the Taken as he was made to solely be on Alan's side and offer him support. Only when Insane Alan gets his hands on him and warps him into a jealous monster is this subverted.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Since he's a fantasy created by Alan to cope with the situation he's in at the Dark Place, Thomas Zane instructs Alan's rational half to get rid of him as well before merging back with his insane half and regaining control. Enraged, the Barry construct goes full Taken and tries to kill Alan in retaliation.
  • Interesting to notice is the fact that the second Rational Alan abandons him, Insane Alan pipes in with his TV screen ramblings, talking about how even Alan's friends were being consumed and sent to attack him. The second Imaginary Barry was abandoned by the Alan controlled by the player, the antagonistic Alan took control of him.
• Varying Tactics Boss: He technically has four phases when you finally confront him at the end of "The Writer", changing between different Taken forms each time. He starts out the first two as a Common before becoming an Assault with a regenerating darkness cover and finally becoming a Tele-Flanker with way more HP and a sturdier shield.
• Voice of the Legion: He has a shadowed undertone to his voice, but it comes across as simply off-putting and noticeable instead of having the same low-pitch growl as the Taken... Until he tries to kill Alan, then it becomes exactly like the Taken.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Doubling with "The Reason You Suck" Speech, throughout his fight with Alan, he calls Alan out on his various personal issues and general temperament that he had to manage as his manager.
  Barry: I literally have a dozen lawyers on speed dial because I never know when you're gonna get in trouble again. You know what kinds of people need that, Al?! Gangsters and assholes! And you're not a gangster, because they make money all the time!

Scratch's Taken

Birdmen, Splitters, Grenadiers, and Giants

Appearances: Alan Wake's American Nightmare | Alan Wake II (Splitters only)

The Taken variations found uniquely in Night Springs, thought into creation by Mr. Scratch.

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• Asteroids Monster: The Splitters are one. They have the ability to turn itself into a steadily growing horde of smaller and weaker Taken the longer light is shone upon them.
  Alan: The enemy tears itself in two to avoid the hated light. They become weaker, but more numerous. Such is the arithmetic of horror.
• Body Horror: While the original Taken were already disturbing in how the Dark Presence affected their bodies, the deformities were still not clear and they otherwise looked like normal people with paler skin and tendrils of darkness across their clothes and limbs. Mr. Scratch's hordes, however, are far more disturbing to look at; Splitters are bone-thin and have darkness tumors growing out of their shoulders and torsos that grow the more they split, Giants have tiny necks and huge bloated shoulder muscles, a Birdman's arms are incredibly long and end in long fingers with sharp talons, among other horrible details.
• Bombardier Mook: Grenadier Taken, the new ranged unit of American Nightmare that throws grenades which explode in blasts of darkness to damage Alan with. It can also damage other Taken regardless of shielding.
• Composite Character: Birdmen are Taken variants that shift into a flock of Ravens to move around the battlefield quickly and dodge Alan's flashlight.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: All of them save the Splitter are unique to American Nightmare, and despite Scratch's reoccurrence none of the others appear in Alan Wake II. Justified as they were an added element for an Actionized Sequel and the sequels doubled down on the slower horror elements of the original, where they would be tonally out of place.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: They are noticeably different from the ones in the original game; not only do they have more noticeable attack variations and actual gimmicks to make them more challenging, they're also more aggressive and tend to speak way less. This is in part due to Mr. Scratch being more rational and free-willed than his dark brethren despite still being a part of them, able to be more creative and hating excessive noise, preferring his minions to be obedient and quiet.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Giants; The flare gun, which could dispatch even the hardiest Taken in a single shot if fired at the right angle in the first game, needs a little over four shots to put one of these down. WITHOUT the Darkness shield.
• Dynamic Entry: The first Splitter that Alan encounters appears launching itself through a door as he approaches to attack him.
• Elite Mooks: All of them are tougher or at least more dangerous than the standard Taken running around Night Springs, yet appear less frequently.
• Giant Mook: The aptly named Giants, which go beyond the bloated proportions of the Assault Taken, and are instead inhumanly large ogres easily triple Alan's size. They are by far the toughest Taken to kill in American Nightmare, with their strong darkness shield, and sheer ability to stomach the bullets Alan throws.
• Long-Range Fighter: The Grenadiers have a dangerous ability to throw long-lasting Darkness bombs as a support role for the Taken. This is the full extent of their abilities, and are otherwise useless if Alan closes the distance.
• One to Million to One: The Birdmen are Taken with the capacity to explode into a swarm of Ravens to add chaos to a battle. They can only be injured and killed when they reform into a human figure.
• Self-Duplication: The main ability of the Splitter Taken in both American Nightmare and Alan Wake II is to duplicate themselves when they are hit by light. In the former game, this can happen several times to the copies but makes them weaker, while the latter entry has them only split once, into two standard strength Taken.
• Zerg Rush: Splitters are the weakest of the group, but their gimmick allows them to quickly split into as many as four dangerous enemies if they are not handled quickly.

Animals & Other

Ravens

Taken Ravens / Books

Appearances: Alan Wake | Alan Wake's American Nightmare | Alan Wake II

Flocks of ravens Taken by the Dark Presence. They appear in huge numbers and make a flying dash towards Alan in order to attack and impede his progress.

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• The Cameo: Their deep squawk is heard in the second game when Saga enters the Cauldron Lake threshold despite otherwise not appearing to menace Bright Falls.
• Creepy Crows: Possessed corvids who move through the night sky like blurs of ink in water. They're strong enough to assault and take down police helicopters.
• Hell Is That Noise: Every attack from the murder is preceded by their distorted cries, which are also echoed every time you see them on the skies above.
• Living Shadow: Like the Taken, they're basically this due to the darkness covering the murder. Fortunately, Ravens are far weaker hosts than humans, since removing the darkness protection is all it takes to kill a flock approaching Alan.
• Palette Swap: In The Signal, where they're reshaped into Alan's previous books made to act like the ravens.
• Shout-Out: The fact they're an aggressive murder of crows attacking a small town makes them an Eldritch version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Barry even lampshades this during a phone call with Alan in Episode 2.
• The Swarm: Even worse than Flankers in this regard, since they'll always come in huge groups, flying overhead and swooping down for a deadly lunge.

Spiders

Spiders

Appearances: Alan Wake's American Nightmare

"For a moment, I actually thought it might be as simple as that. Then I heard too many legs skittering across the ground."

—Alan Wake, Too Many Legs

Giant spider-like creatures made out of darkness that can swarm Alan in huge numbers. Unlike the Ravens, these are not animals possessed by the Dark Presence.

---

• Eldritch Abomination: They're not a new variant of Taken animals. A manuscript page reveals that they come directly from the Dark Place as "fauna" belonging to it, slipping through the cracks the Dark Presence made when it wormed its way into the human world through Cauldron Lake.
• Giant Spider: They're not the size of cars, but they're still bigger than any spider species known, and just as creepy to look at.
• The Swarm: They're weak enough to be killed by either the flashlight or gunfire, but their main approach is to swarm Alan with their large numbers.

Wolves

Wolves

Appearances: Alan Wake II

Grey wolves of the woods around Bright Falls, who have become Taken beasts.

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• Fragile Speedster: Not quite as strong as the Taken, and not protected by Darkness shields, but much faster, harder to hit, and aggressive.
• Savage Wolves: Giant lupine beasts who menace Saga in the woods.

Poltergeists

Poltergeists

Appearances: Alan Wake | Alan Wake's American Nightmare | Alan Wake II

Random inanimate objects used by the Dark Presence to hurt Alan. They can range from simple barrels to large vehicles.

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• Animate Inanimate Object: They're common, everyday objects shrouded by the Dark Presence and made to levitate and hurl themselves at Alan in order to deal damage. They can be anything from simple empty barrels to junkyard pieces, gates, construction equipment and even large vehicles.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: Some Poltergeists are heavy-set vehicles that are fought in obvious arenas full of supplies around the perimeter so Alan won't run out of batteries while clearing the darkness from them.
• Car Fu: Poltergeist vehicles will drive themselves at Alan in an attempt to run him over. They can be normal cars or, as is the case with Episode 6, a monster truck. Episode 4 also includes a fight with a combine harvester.
• Demoted to Extra: They barely appear in Alan Wake II. What's more, they don't even attack the player characters any more, and are used exclusively to block paths.
• Gate Guardian: Mostly because, some of the time, they are the gate you need to go through.
• Hell Is That Noise: The common Poltergeists will emit a shrill hissing sound as they start to rise and twitch, signifying they're readying a lunge.
• Living Shadow: Of inanimate objects that once littered the environment before being used by the Dark Presence to attack Alan. Much like the Ravens, however, even if the object is a large vehicle, removing the darkness over the object will immediately destroy it.
• Took a Level in Badass: Taking away the dark cover over the objects is all it takes to make them disappear in the original game. In American Nightmare, they function more like the Taken and actually require gunfire to be fully destroyed afterwards.

Neutral Entities

Bright Presence

Bright Presence

Voiced by: James McCaffrey (as Thomas Zane)

Appearances: Alan Wake

The antithesis of the Dark Presence that also resides in the Dark Place. Taking the form of Thomas Zane, it helps Alan throughout his journey and is also trying to stop its counterpart from escaping into the human world, although for its own alien reasons.

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• Big Good: It helps Alan and gives him the information and power needed to oppose the darkness just as the Dark Presence tries to stop and hurt him. That being said, it's not as simple as "good versus evil" given that it's also a faceless power from another dimension.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Like the Dark Presence, its motives are unclear. The only aspect of its morality known to both Alan and the audience is that it opposes the darkness ever since the two came to be within the Dark Place, and helping Alan gives it the means to keep the fight going.
• Eldritch Abomination: Just like its equally abstract sibling, the Bright Presence is a force indescribable by human standards, appearing as bright flashes of light when it's not taking on Zane's form in a diving suit.
• Foil: There's more to the two forces underneath Cauldron Lake than just the obvious "light versus darkness" element. While both forces exist within the Dark Place and are nebulous enough to be beyond simple understanding, they differ in their methods and goals; the Dark Presence wants to leave its dimension and spread across the human world to take it over, corrupting and killing people left and right to make them into its avatars and ground forces while empowering itself off human creativity that it uses for its own purposes. The Bright Presence, on the other hand, seems to only be manifesting among humans so it can stop its antithesis and has, so far, only used one host to manifest itself through, with said host still somehow alive within the light and still able to create (or at least influence) written works on their own. Finally, the Darkness completely erases the personality of its hosts so it can use their bodies, while the Light seems to be having an identity crisis regarding its singular host.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: Because there is a Dark Presence, it stands to reason that there is one of Light, and it's been helping Alan against its counterpart all the while.
• Loss of Identity: Maybe. During The Writer, Alan's questions towards "Thomas Zane" about Mr. Scratch seem to slowly cause him - or the entity using his image - some level of distress, to the point Zane breaks the Mr. Exposition tone he's used all game to start questioning himself over it, before abruptly quitting the line of questioning and urging Alan to continue on with the story. Further, Zane still seems to act as himself and have his memories most of the time, but clearly having something else influencing his actions. It's possible that the Bright Presence started seeing itself as Thomas Zane or assimilated his memories into itself so it could properly help Alan, except it hasn't done so completely and is unsure of just what it is anymore. Given the nature of the entities in the Dark Place, it's very hard to tell beyond speculation.

The Filmmaker

"Tom Zane" / Thomas Seine

Appearances: Control | Alan Wake II

Portrayed by: Ilkka Villi

"I'm a filmmaker. An auteur like yourself."

^{Click here to see him in Control}

"If the waves keep pushing you away, you just need to find another way in. We go with the flow of this ocean. Catch you soon, brother."

Or at least, someone claiming to be Alan's old ally. What he wants and why he's decided to assume this particular disguise is unknown, but it's doubtful he has Alan's best interests at heart.

For more information on the man named Thomas Zane (or at least one of them), see the Bright Falls page.

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• Affably Evil: He is suspicious as can be and all of his scenes carry an odd, sinister undertone, but he is never (openly) anything but chummy to Alan, and later Dr. Darling. He goes out of his way to compliment Darling, treats both him and Alan to drinks and an earnest offer of collaboration, and even drags Alan into a Good-Times Montage when they meet for the first time in the loop.
• Ambiguous Situation: Who is he? What is he? What does he want with Alan? What connection does he have to Mr. Scratch and the Dark Presence? Why was he claiming to be a filmmaker rather than a poet, and why did Jesse's memories "update" themselves to match that? Why did Alan seem to be so afraid of him during the penultimate cutscene of the AWE DLC of Control? Why was he speaking Finnish when toasting Alan?
  • The last question at least is answered in Alan Wake II with the reveal that Thomas Zane is an immigrant from Finland. Though whether this was always the case or an internal retcon (like him now being a film maker instead of a poet) is unclear.
• Ambiguously Bi: He compliments Alan as a "handsome devil" and gushes over Darling's muscular physique, but even with his rewritten backstory, he was apparently still in love with Barbara Jagger. An interview with Ilkka Villi had him comment he distinguished his portrayals of Alan and Tom by having Seine be fluid and unconcerned about everything in contrast to the perpetually stressed Alan, which extended to his view of gender and sexuality, quite literally describing him as In Touch with His Feminine Side.
• Ambiguously Evil: What his true motivations are is wrapped in mystery. He lies to Alan throughout the second game and collaborates with Scratch to write a story that would enslave the world, but also willingly gives Alan the means to defeat Scratch with a final murder site when he comes knocking. He claims Scratch betrayed him and he only wants to get out of the Dark Place, but also seems to try and kill Alan immediately after he says this. He also shows distrust toward the FBC, a group much more definitively trying to help Wake.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He's very lighthearted and constantly cracking jokes toward the confused Alan, but the final time they interact in Alan Wake II shows he is far more powerful than he lets on as he shrugs off a headshot and delivers an ominous poem to Alan.
• Bilingual Bonus: During his first appearance, he toasts Alan with the Finnish "Kippis!" Considering that Ahti, possibly one of the most powerful characters in the Remedy Shared Universe, is Finnish, there are some very odd implications one could garner from this. Later revealed that this version of Thomas Zane's true name is Thomas Seine, and he's a Finnish native whose work found cult success in America.
• Cosmic Retcon: By the time of Alan Wake II, the reality altering effect of the Dark Place combined with his movies means he has completely supplanted Tom the Poet's existence in both dimensions. Everyone but the very few with Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory now believe a Finnish filmmaker came to Bright Falls, established a (literal) cult following in the town and then mysteriously disappeared instead of being a quiet poet who enjoyed diving.
• Deal with the Devil: He makes it a habit to offer up a deal to several third parties caught in the Dark Place, with the common factor of his "collaborators" seems to be a level of understanding of how the dimension functions. The terms are simple: collaborate with him on a film so both parties get to escape the Dark Place, but given he is perfectly willing to offer it to Scratch, and both Alan and Darling seem subconsciously coerced to trust him and take the deal, it is obviously not an act of altruistic charity on his part.
• Doppelgänger: He looks exactly like Alan, and while it's not been revealed if he's evil, Alan doesn't trust the guy one whit. Understandable, considering his track record with doppelgangers.
• The Dreaded: During his final cutscene, Alan is desperately trying to think of a way to escape, whispering that "he" is coming. It's either "Zane" or Mr. Scratch, but there probably isn't much of a difference between the two, if there's any at all.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Just before the Ordinary AWE is a recording of one of Jesse's therapy sessions where her therapist mentions that she looked up Zane after Jesse talked about his poetry, but could not find any poet by that name, only a European filmmaker who came to America in the sixties.
• Forgettable Character: Alan's evidently met and forgot about him several times. In Control he acts like he and Alan are old friends, while Alan spends the scene disoriented and confused at his sudden appearance. In Alan Wake II, when he directs Alan over the phone in his campaign, Alan can't put a face to his voice and repeatedly asks him to identify himself.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: While he is still physically identical to Alan as he was in Control, and thus played by the same actor, come Alan Wake II Tom is completely clean-shaven, sports a messier haircut than Alan, and speaks with a subtle Finnish accent (from Ilkka's natural speaking voice).
• Ironic Name: His last name is phonetically identical to the word "sane", but he spends all of his time on screen acting distinctly kooky and insane.
• Manipulative Bastard: Whatever he actually is, it's clear he seems intent on getting Alan to drop his guard enough to write things in "Zane's" favor; He claims to be in the middle of an "artistic collaboration" with Wake, which probably can't mean anything good, and also claims that Alan has already "found a way" to escape, even though he clearly still has a ways to go before getting out of the Dark Presence's grasp.
• Method Acting: An apparently reality-bending In-Universe example: he claims his "previous" identity as a poet was him merely acting as the protagonist of one of his old films, presumably complete with a tragic backstory about losing and trying to revive his lover. It's probably bullshit, considering everything else off about him, but then again, if anything could make an actor's role a reality, it'd be the powers of Cauldron Lake...
  • In Alan Wake 2, his first and last lines in the Oceanview are poems (ones taken directly from the This House Of Dreams blog/arg which were supposedly written by the original Zane) and his movie theater in the Dark Place is called "Poet's Cinema". If he wasn't originally a poet that was turned into a filmmaker, then it seems he got so into the role that he's still heavily associated with poetry.
• Mind Rape: Implied to be capable of this. Every Dark Place cutscene is accompanied by nightmarish flashes of a maddened Alan, The Writer-style, and Alan himself whenever he talks to "Zane" seems dazed, like he's concussed. In addition, after viewing the first cutscene with him, Jesse's normally Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory seems to shift, as she identifies "Zane" as a filmmaker rather than a poet, acting as if he's always been the former and she was just confused.
• Mysterious Informant: In Alan Wake II, once Alan starts remembering again, he begins to contact him through telephone and guide his journey, all the while keeping his identity a mystery until they meet in person.
• Naturalized Name: While its unclear if it even is his true name, backstory established about the "cult-classic filmmaker" in Alan Wake II reveals the birth name of Tom Zane was Thomas Seine. As a Finnish immigrant, he changed it to better fit in with the American populace.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Seems to hold a level of control over his films that protects him from harm. In their final confrontation, Alan ends up shooting him before leaving. The moment he is out of the picture, the wound magically transforms into makeup and Zane gets up unharmed.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Subverted. He looks, sounds, and acts nothing like the original Thomas Zane. In fact, he looks exactly like Alan. But somehow, everyone who comes across him accepts him as the genuine article, and even Jesse's memory of the original Zane becomes "updated" after seeing him. She even saw him next to Alan and didn't think it was the least bit weird that they looked identical (of course, at this point she's probably been conditioned to not think anything is weird, but still).
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: He met Tim Breaker at one point and tried to coax him into helping Zane find Alan in the Dark Place. When he inquired about Tim's outfit and was told Tim was an actual sheriff, instead of a man in a costume like Tom believed, he promptly ran for the hills.
• Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome: Assuming that he actually is Alan's old ally, Thomas Zane's sudden change in behavior suggests he is now an enemy.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Oddly, with Scratch in Alan Wake II the Same Character, But Different, Tom takes on most of the traits he loses. He is also a Doppelgänger of Alan in a suit, is prominently associated with screens and communicating through visual mediums to his double, and acts obsessively chummy with him while hiding darker intentions. "The Happy Song" from American Nightmare even becomes associated with him instead of Scratch.
• Teleportation: In his films, with only a brief cut he can go from sitting next to Alan to standing on the other side of the room. In their confrontation when he is bound to a chair, he tries to swap himself with the standing Alan, and the two flicker between both positions for a moment before Alan shoots him.
• Walking Spoiler: Talking about his alleged appearance is impossible without revealing both the ending of Alan Wake, and how it's in the same universe as Control.

Mr. Door

Mr. Warlin Door

Portrayed by: David Harewood

Appearances: Control^note Mentioned only | Alan Wake II

"You left us on quite the cliffhanger. We've all been dying to know what, 'It's not a lake, it's an ocean,' really means."

"A door that stands between two rooms is in both. A door that can lead anywhere, is everywhere. That door is the center."

The enigmatic host of In Between with Mr. Door, a talk show in the Dark Place.

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• Ambiguously Evil: He's connected to the primary antagonist of Control and comes off as deeply ominous during his last appearance in Alan Wake II, but he's a neutral force at worst towards Wake and doesn't seem affiliated with the Dark Place; and if Dylan's ramblings are to be believed, hostile to the idea of the Hiss spreading, as well.
• The Chessmaster: Tor indicates that Door was (and still is) this, which caused friction between Door and the brothers:
  Tor: Your dad was a complicated bastard. Always thinking too many steps ahead. That's not how we work.
• Dimensional Traveler: According to Dylan/the Hiss, Mr. Door is an entity that exists singularly within every universe at the same time.
• Early-Bird Cameo: A brief flash of his face shows up when Tim vanishes into the Dark Place at the tail end of "Invitation", while he isn't properly introduced into the narrative until two episodes later in "Late Night".
• Expy: Of Martin Hatch from Quantum Break; both are mysterious entities resembling black men with the ability to manipulate reality and exist across space-time, and "Door" and "Hatch" are synonyms. Door was originally going to be more explicitly an Alternate Self of Hatch through sharing an actor, like plenty of other characters in the Alan Wake/Control series, but Lance Reddick died before he had the chance to portray him.
• The Glasses Come Off: Before his final talk with Wake, he sits at his desk still covered in shadows and takes his glasses off for the only time. While he never gets physical with Alan, the connotations of establishing how serious Door is in the moment remains.
• Horror Host: Keeping with the other aspects of Night Springs lifted verbatim from The Twilight Zone, the role of the Rod Serling-esque stoic, suit-wearing narrator of every episode falls to him.
• Humanoid Abomination: All evidence points toward him being, at best, human adjacent. He has been a resident of the Dark Place for decades, can warp reality to a limited degree, and the way he phrases one of his rebuttals to Alan makes it seem like his current form is actively taken for his benefit.
  Door: [The show] was to indulge you, but we can stop pretending now.
  Alan: Masks come off.
  Door: Oh, I wouldn't go that far.
• Immune to Fate: Even more so than Saga. He's not controlled by the reality warping of the Dark Presence in the slightest, and his few appearances in the manuscript pages make it clear that he's not only aware that the story's recording him, but that the only reason he's appearing in it at all is because he's allowing it to happen for his own reasons.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Most of his dialogue concerning Alan's horror books have double meanings that apply to the game series. He refers to the Sequel Gap, the Cliffhanger ending, and makes mention of the general metafictional nature of the story, then and now.
• Mr. Exposition: Gives the rundown of Alan's writing career and his relationship with his writing and characters in his first broadcast.
• Mysterious Parent: Mr. Door is all but outright stated to be Saga's father who disappeared when she was a baby. When Saga asks her grandfather about her dad, Tor says "some doors are better left unopened" and at the end of the game, Saga is able to manifest a door to where she needs to go in the Dark Place just as Mr. Door was just stated to have done (at the same spot even). When profiling him, he even says that this power is unique to his family.
• Mysterious Watcher: While he is willing to interact with Wake directly, he acts like this to Tim Breaker. He keeps himself just out of Tim's reach and understanding, while simultaneously dragging him further into the Dark Place and toward Door himself, for unknown purposes.
• Never Found the Body: When he disappeared in the eighties, he was hit by lightning and any evidence of his presence simply vanished in the night. He was declared missing and presumed dead, but the Breakers could never find out what really happened on that night. Unbeknown to them, he instead transcended to a different form of reality due to a "deal" with the Andersons.
• Non-Standard Character Design: In a sense. While Remedy is no stranger to portraying their characters in live-action, Door is unique in only ever appearing in live-action segments. Even when he should logically continue to be present in the scene, he simply blips out of existence the moment gameplay begins.
  Door: Thank you for the strangest interview of my entire career, Alan. All this talk of meta-narratives, I'm half-expecting to disappear once this scene ends!
• Not So Above It All: In his appearances, he varies between unflappably cheerful as a talk show host and ominous when revealing the truth of the situation to Alan. Despite this, he is also the mastermind of the musical Alan experiences in Initiation 4, which show Door happily dancing and singing with the Old Gods. He also gives the whole affair a really unwieldly title with a silly grin on his face.
  Door: I like to call this next segment, "The Story of the Journey of Alan Wake: The Musical".
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Wake encounters Door for the last time, he drops the jovial talk-show host persona and darkly tells Wake that his constant escape attempts are beginning to interfere with Door's own plans. He lets Wake go, but with the warning that he'll suffer severe consequences if he doesn't keep his distance. He may also be feeling protective of Saga.
• Papa Wolf: Mr. Door during a conversation with Alan later in the game outright threatens him for involving someone he cares about, likely referring to Saga. He also might be responsible for Dr. Campbell being brought into the Dark Place instead of Saga at the end of the nursery rhyme questline.
• Smash Cut: Mr. Door can seemingly teleport Alan to his talkshow for an "interview" when necessary and deposit him elsewhere in the Dark Place without warning; it is ambiguous if it is literal teleportation or Alan not remembering coming and going though Alan believes it is the latter.
• The Talk Show with Host Name: Minus the first "The" as mentioned above.
• Turn the Other Cheek: Decades ago, his last interaction with the Anderson brothers was hostile, taking Odin's eye and being cursed out for his plans. When the Anderson Brothers enter the Dark Place for the first time and reencounter Door, the three mutually forgive each other and Door gives them commodities in his personal chunk of the Dark Place.
• Unseen No More: Dylan Faden has mentioned meeting him before, now Alan can meet him in person.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Initially Alan doesn't notice anything unusual about Door's "interviews", as if he led a normal life as a celebrity and made a series of interviews on a talkshow he can't remember clearly. It takes a few before it dawns on him that being teleported to a talkshow in the Dark Place is probably nothing good.
• Was Once a Man: After marrying Freya Anderson and becoming a father to Saga, Door was offered up to the Dark Presence to keep the rest of the Anderson family safe. He was then trapped in the Dark Place, whereupon he became a multiversal entity.
• You Are Not Alone: Door notes this to Alan in their last meeting. His tone is unusually tense and aggressive for this trope, likely due to Alan trying to always make things as subtle as indirect as possible and not taking proper advantage of the assistance he has.
  "You are so lucky, you know. There are so many people helping you, armies of people. Myself. Your wife."

Dark Place Casey

Detective Alex Casey

Portrayed by: James McCaffrey (voice), Sam Lake (model)

Appearances: Alan Wake II

"How meta can you get, he said, looking knowingly at the camera."

"This city will suck you dry if you stay here for too long. You'll end up a lost soul haunting the streets and alleys, a faded-out shadow glimpsed by some other poor bastard on his way toward the same fate."

A conjured up variant of Alex's own hardboiled detective character, who confronts him in the Dark Place's twisted version of New York City.

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• Agonizing Stomach Wound: During their second, far more openly hostile confrontation, Alan is compelled by Scratch to gut shot Casey after he ambushes Alan in an alley. We are treated to him doing The Dying Walk before collapsing, visibly struggling to breathe and writhing in agony before expiring. Even his Final Speech is filled with more earnest despair than the usual caustic cynicism.
• The Alcoholic: He alludes to "therapy from Dr. Jack Daniels" brought on frequently by his disgust at the state of the city. He mentions a desire to drink away the events of Poet's Cinema, but notes nothing would be strong enough.
• Almost Dead Guy: After being killed in the alley for the first time, he lives just long enough to spit out a final few words of spite to Alan before dropping dead.
• And the Adventure Continues: His final fate in II, portrayed in the bleakest manner possible. In the final echo Alan finds, he survives his trip to the Poet's Cinema, but comes away with the unnerving revelation that he's merely a fictional character bound by the conventions of his genre. As a noir detective protagonist, he'll never be able to truly stop any crimes, merely solve them after they occur (unless they're so bizarre he can't even do that, as is the case this time), and he'll never be able to find any peace for as long as there are still more stories about him to be told. Resigning himself to his fate, he walks off into the night in search of his next case.
  Casey: There wasn't enough alcohol in this city to drown the memories of this nightmare, but I'd damn well try. This case would never be closed, I had more questions now than at the start, the irony of being trapped in a postmodern detective story. I felt watched, the eyes of some unseen audience on me. I wanted to turn to the hidden camera and tell them to fuck off, but I didn't know where to look to break the fourth wall. There would always be another case for Casey. A million stories in this dark city. The night opened up to welcome me. I walked into her arms. Roll credits.
• Art Initiates Life: The shared name, voice, and familiar appearance are all tip offs that Alan's best selling Cowboy Cop exists as an independent, sapient construct of the Dark Place due to the Dark Presence's influence. While the real Casey turns out to only partially resemble the character, this version takes full inspiration from the book character.
• Back from the Dead: In his first appearance, he is mortally wounded by an unexplained presence and bleeds out. While writing the different drafts of Initiation, Alan stumbles across him alive and well further in the game's events... only for him to die once more.
• Captain Ersatz: The Detective serves as one for Remedy's own Max Payne (whose rights are tied to Take-Two Interactive), and one that’s Truer to the Text than the real-world Casey.
• Character Filibuster: His narration always takes a turn for the verbose, and with dozens of "Echoes" of the man to listen to throughout New York, optional and mandatory, Alan will get to hear him talk a lot.
• Hardboiled Detective: Gruff, cynical, and a detective on a one man crusade to bring a mysterious cult leader to justice.
• Hero of Another Story: Alan steadily uncovers the details of Casey's own investigation into the crimes of the Cult of the Word and Mr. Scratch prior to his entrance to the plot.
• Inspector Javert: He comes to believe Alan is the leader of the Cult of the Word and for "Scratch" to simply be an alias he's using, due to the Cult's obsession with Wake's writing and his reputation. He confronts him as such repeatedly in the Dark Place.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Deploys a severe beating on one of the cultists in the Poet's Cinema to try and learn about the Cult of the Word's Grandmaster. It doesn't work, but the cultist tells him what he wants to know willingly, as it keeps Casey moving according to their plan.
• Knight in Sour Armor: He's bitter, jaded, and has a low opinion of the city he calls home, but strives to do the right thing and bring a dangerous man to justice nonetheless. It's a shame he doesn't last long.
• Mistaken Identity: When Casey first confronts Alan, he is just off the heels of an interview where he met Sam Lake, an identical actor who is playing Casey in the movies. Alan understandably confuses the two until Casey's Inner Monologue makes it obvious he is the character, not the actor.
• Nice to the Waiter: In the Echoes, he is far more cordial speaking to the Booker couple's Dark Place equivalents than normal. He hears out their separate Infodumps on the Cult of the Word and while he doesn't drop the snark, he never unfairly directs it toward them, only the Cult's actions.
• Perma-Stubble: Unlike his real world variant who is clean-shaven and professional, he has some significant stubble on on his face.
• Private Eye Monologue: Harkening back to Max Payne, his internal narration of the scene is delivered like this, which Alan is somehow able to listen in on as early as Casey's first death.
• Rabid Cop: Beats a cultist to get information, and both times he confronts Wake, he riles himself up at the prospect of Alan being a Cult leader and either pulls a gun on him, or moves to do so before being interrupted.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Goes on a rant about how God is an uncaring, sadistic observer who actively stops anyone from making it to paradise and ruins their lives just for an arbitrary kick. His wording also happens to make it all sound just as likely to be a speech directed toward Alan himself.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: He favors a revolver and keeps one for personal use. After he stops needing it, Alan is able to claim it for himself as a reliable first weapon against the Taken.
• Sanity Slippage: Begins to lose it in the Poet's Cinema in the face of the cultists treating him like a character in their story and seeing himself starring in a movie he had no recollection of. It gets to the point when stuck in a Unnaturally Looping Location, he gets into an argument with his own repeating voice.
• Tarot Motifs: During his second death, he collapses into the cross-legged pose of the Hanged Man. The card represents wisdom and prophecy, Foreshadowing how his monologue about he and Alan carrying the Darkness of the city within them will turn out to be all too literal.
• Tragic Dream: Relates in an optional echo his desire to find it in himself to drive off to a place where "the sun still rose", and find a good home and family there. While other versions of him find that sunrise, he is condemned to a life as a borderline prop in hollow shell of the real New York.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Being a fictional character existing in an Eldritch Location, he dies more than once during Alan Wake's time in the city as a prelude to any "Return" segments, typically from a bullet in an alleyway. The fact that he's the protagonist of Wake's noir narrative probably helps too.
• Truer to the Text: The FBI agent Alex Casey in the real world is a far kinder and more reasonable person than he is in the novels. In the Dark Place, Casey is far more headstrong and quickly turns to aggression, much more like the novels (and the actual Max Payne). His style of dress is also far more one to one of Max in his first game, with a leather jacket and kitschy tie.

Sam Lake

Sam Lake

Portrayed by: Sam Lake

Appearances: Alan Wake II

A Finnish actor portraying Alex Casey. Maybe.

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• Alternate Self: Assuming he is a conjuration of the Dark Place, he is an alternate of a real man named Sam Lake, who Alan met in the real world on the Harry Garrett show.
• Ascended Fanboy: In his interview with Wake, he comments on how he loves the Alex Casey books. Wake, in turn, comments on how Lake is everything he imagined Casey to be and approves of the actor's portrayal, if not the movies themselves.
• Bad "Bad Acting": When he shows up in the back of the Poet's Cinema, he is begging very stiffly for Wake to not go BEHIND HIM and TAKE THE KNIFE there, then use it to SACRIFICE HIM to OPEN THE WAY FORWARD. Alan even comments on how flat Lake's dialogue is and how contrived the whole situation feels, like a scene's first draft.
• Creator Cameo: Sam Lake, Remedy Entertainment's long time writer and director, shows up as an actor of the same name.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Apparently a friend of Mr. Door, the Ambiguously Human Dimensional Traveler. Most of Lake's appearances are on Door's show as a well-liked guest, their photos around the studio show them posing with each other like old friends.
• Identical Stranger: As he is an actor hired to portray Casey, he looks just like the real man and his Dark Place double, despite having a different name and entirely different disposition.
• Nice Guy: He is polite to Alan, and sympathetic to the writer's feelings of dissatisfaction with the series of Alex Casey movie adaptations Lake is starring in.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: In the Poet's Cinema, when Alan grabs the knife to sacrifice him, he suddenly manages to break free and promptly flees the scene.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: In all his appearances, he is in a sharp suit, fitting for a talk show appearance.

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