When coming up with a power for the main villain I wanted it to be something brand new to the series. If this is the last bad guy you see, he'd better be memorable. I had it narrowed down to either metal manipulation or blood manipulation. With metal manipulation, the bad guy would be able to control the shape and consistency of any metal he touches. He'd also wear metal bracers or gauntlets that he could morph into spikes, claws, blades or long sharp wire tendrils. He'd have similar capabilities to the T-1000 in Terminator 2. I ended up going with the blood manipulation power because it helped solidify the plot and it fit in perfectly with the overall horror motif. It also had an interesting mechanic that if he used his own blood as a weapon, he'd naturally want more of it to play with so he'd end up collecting it over time and storing it to use later. Specifically the idea for Helloween Thirteen being a game show came from the video game Silent Hill 2. In the hospital level while you wait in the elevator, a bizarre transmission comes over your radio. It's literally a game show with a host that knows your name and asks you questions. It comes out of nowhere and leaves with no explanation for ANYTHING. The challenge is completely optional. The correct answers correspond to a combo lock on a mysterious box in the hospital. If you get it right, you get a big stash of supplies. If you get it wrong, you get seriously injured. It was just one of those really odd and disquieting moments in a video game that stuck with me.
I wrote the actual game Helloween Thirteen to resemble a twisted version of a cadet's military training as described in the first chapter of the book. The game can be thought of as an obstacle course with a linear path through several challenges to an eventual finish line. Things like the presence of eggs, the fact that Travis dresses up like a private and relies on his training to accomplish specific tasks creates a scenario akin to a nightmare which has incorporated elements from his own reality.
Inspiration for the climax came from Hard Target. Hard Target is an action movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme which I've seen twice in my life. Once when I was probably ten or younger and once when I was 23. That's a big gap. I remembered absolutely nothing about the movie except the name and the climax with the Mardi Gras floats.
Six is killed in the way that Angela from the first book was originally supposed to be killed. Angela's cause of death was changed because I didn't think it fit the scenario even though I really liked it. I'm glad I got to finally use it.
Are Six's powers magic?
I really want to say no because I've written all of the previous books as if magic doesn't exist in this universe. This is a science universe where things that would be considered paranormal in our universe are more or less explained and controlled. So what is magic? In pop culture it's basically an unseen power with little or no explanation behind it that can be tapped into with a set of steps in some form of a ritual or discipline. Well isn't that unseen power basically what ether is? But ether is pretty much established as a rule or an ambient force of nature like plate tectonics or the Earth's magnetic poles.
Then there's the aspect of Six using elements from magic books to enhance his innate abilities. That means one of two things. If I declare that ether is definitively science then Six has made a hybrid of science and magic by controlling ether manifestation through these old world spells. Or it means that these "magic spells" have graduated from magic to science because they were true all along and were actually based around the user being an ether channeler. That opens a whole new can of worms.
Red Eye is an antagonist archetype commonplace in slasher movies and survival horror video games who is relentless, much more powerful and seemingly indestructible compared to the protagonist who can only rely on stealth and quick thinking to stave them off until an eventual showdown. Red Eye has the clothes of Jericho Cross, the eyes of a T-100 terminator, the concealed weapons of Baraka, the bandages of the invisible man, the ‘personality’ of Jason Voorhees but inspired mostly from Mr. X. (If you get all of those references, I’m impressed.)
In Helloween Thirteen, Travis is in his early forties but has the body of about a thirty year old.
Influences and inspiration for Helloween 13 include Silent Hill, Saw, Die Hard III, Hard Target and The Game.Trinity is the first female not to be deliberately named after a video game character. Instead her name begins with ‘Tr’ just like her parents’ names.
If Six were a Batman villain, he would be a cross between the Riddler and Calendar Man.
The boogeyman that Trish makes up to scare her daughter is essentially Bobby Barrows, AKA “Scissorman,” from the Clock Tower video games.
The general scenario and quote “You miserable pycho!” from the scene where Travis comes across all of the eggs in the burning building is directly transposed from a scene in the cartoon SWAT Kats. In the scene, one of the protagonists is riding a missile through the sky launched by the episode’s villain. He knows in order to make the missile inert, he simply has to cut the red wire. When he opens the panel on the missile, he finds that the interior seems to be nothing more than a mass of red wires.
In Helloween Thirteen, Travis is in his early forties but has the body of about a thirty year old.
Influences and inspiration for Helloween 13 include Silent Hill, Saw, Die Hard III, Hard Target and The Game.Trinity is the first female not to be deliberately named after a video game character. Instead her name begins with ‘Tr’ just like her parents’ names.
If Six were a Batman villain, he would be a cross between the Riddler and Calendar Man.
The boogeyman that Trish makes up to scare her daughter is essentially Bobby Barrows, AKA “Scissorman,” from the Clock Tower video games.
The general scenario and quote “You miserable pycho!” from the scene where Travis comes across all of the eggs in the burning building is directly transposed from a scene in the cartoon SWAT Kats. In the scene, one of the protagonists is riding a missile through the sky launched by the episode’s villain. He knows in order to make the missile inert, he simply has to cut the red wire. When he opens the panel on the missile, he finds that the interior seems to be nothing more than a mass of red wires.
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