The Crow / Eric Draven

People once believed that when someone dies a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.

A building gets torched. All that is left is ashes. I used to think that was true about everything: families, friends, feelings. But now I know that sometimes, if love proves real… if two people were meant to be together… nothing can tear them apart.

If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.

On a cold Halloween night, Eric Draven and his fiancé, Shelly Webster, are brutally murdered by a drug lord's gang. Eric is shot and thrown out of a window after he enters his apartment and finds T-Bird, Fun Boy, Skank, and Tin Tin raping Shelly. Shelly dies nearly a day later from various injuries, but Eric's last living memory is falling six floors through their loft window. One year later, though, the crow brings Eric back to avenge his death and set things right.

Confused, Eric digs himself out of his grave and follows the mysterious crow who guides him back through the rain and towards his abandoned loft. There, Eric finds mementos of his life with Shelly, some clothes, but is quickly ambushed by memories of the event a year before. The rush of memories is so powerful that Eric feels everything all over again, including his fall from the window. As he holds on to the broken windowsill and swings back inside, he sees his hands, cut and bloodied, quickly heal themselves. When he realizes that everything actually happened and is not some dream, Eric looks at a drama mask that belonged to Shelly and quickly changes into some black clothes left over, paints his face like a comedy mask, and sets out to find his murders.

He has been given the powers of an avenger. He cannot feel physical pain, his wounds heal with supernatural quickness, and he is strong enough to take on any opponent. Eric is given a chance only the truly tortured are ever given: he will give punishment to sinners while they still roam Earth.

One by one, he takes out each gang member with brutal efficiency, slowly making his way towards the drug lord himself, Top Dollar. As the bodies pile up, Eric realizes the trivial things are not trivial and takes in one of Shelly's old friends, an eleven-year old girl named Sarah. Aided by a rogue cop named Albrecht, Eric soon learns that Top Dollar is simply the tip of a vast criminal network that, every Devil's Night, wrecks havoc on the city, destroying buildings and killing innocents as if it were a game. Eric then decides that, as long as he is able to, he will bring them all down for their sins.

In his quest, Eric murders dozens of criminals with no retribution in the after-life, despite the cold-blooded and calculated nature of his own crimes. The gang members are stabbed, shot, burned, thrown from buildings, or left to die. Soon, though, Top Dollar realizes that Eric is simply a man, and discovers that the crow is his link to the land of the dead. After kidnapping Sarah, he cripples the crow, turning Eric into a mere mortal. Despite being able to feel pain and be wounded, Eric fights Top Dollar, using a memory of Shelly's last moments to make the drug lord feel a day of pain in a single instant. Despite his victory, Eric is mortally wounded. After he takes Sarah and makes sure Albrecht is safe, Eric crawls back towards his grave, where Shelly's ghost appears to guide him back to