ONYX THE FORTUITOUS AND THE TALISMAN OF SOULS: An Interview With Director Andrew Bowser!

Introduction

Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls will be released exclusively in theaters for a one-night special event on October 19. The film will show at 7:00 pm & 10:00 pm (local times) in theaters throughout the country. Additionally, fans will be treated to a special introduction from writer/director/star Andrew Bowser.

Since its Sundance premiere, the energy surrounding the film has steadily grown with Bloody Disgusting praising the “endearing quirkiness, endless ’80s/’90s influences, and horror whimsy” and RogerEbert.com calling it “a handmade horror gem.” Based on Bowser’s viral internet character of the same name and in the spirit of films such as Beetlejuice (1988), Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and Ernest Scared Stupid (1991).

Onyx tells the story of an amateur occultist who learns that sometimes when you raise hell, you get a little burned. Misunderstood by all who know him, Marcus J. Trillbury (Bowser), aka Onyx the Fortuitous, is struggling to find purpose in his soul-devouring side gig. But just when it seems he’s ready to throw in the towel, he receives a coveted invitation to the mansion of his idol Bartok the Great (Jeffrey Combs of Re-Animator) for a ritual to raise the spirit of an ancient demon.

Ecstatic, he joins Bartok, his mysterious delegate Farrah (Olivia Taylor Dudley of The Magicians), and a collection of fellow devotees as they prepare for the ceremony. But quickly it becomes apparent things are not what they seem. As Onyx and his new friends fight to keep their souls, he must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in order to meet his destiny.

The popular viral character Onyx the Fortuitous has garnered over three hundred million views online and has over one million followers on TikTok, catapulting him to fame and cementing his status as a pop culture icon. Onyx fearlessly blends spine-chilling monsters with side-splitting humor, infusing the dark arts with a playful and lighthearted energy.

Cinema Scholars’ own Glen Dower recently sat down with director Andrew Bowser to discuss his new feature film, Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls. They talked about the backstory and creation of Onyx, Andrew’s numerous influences (including Bobcat Goldthwait), and the incredible cast and crew that Andrew lined up for his film, among other topics.

(Edited for content and clarity)

Interview

Glen Dower:

Andrew Bowser, how are you, Sir?

Andrew Bowser:

I’m good. How are you?

Glen Dower:

I’m really good. So where are we talking today?

Andrew Bowser:

I’m in Spain, I’m at the CIS Film Festival. So we were in Barcelona for three days and now we’re here for Onyx. He’s taken me around the world.

Glen Dower:

We’re here to talk about Onyx, of course, the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, what a title, I was in already with that title.

Andrew Bowser:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Glen Dower:

This is not my first encounter with the character, being from the UK, but some of our readers have not heard of Onyx before. Can you give us a backstory?

Andrew Bowser:

Sure. So Onyx is a character that I created in 2012 in a series of internet sketches. I was taking improv classes at UCB in LA at the time, and we were just exploring different characters. My day job was, I was a video producer for different nerdy video outlets, so I was going to a lot of comic book conventions and gaming conventions.

And so I’d be there as a camera operator and editor and I decided to do the character that I had been working on at one of these conventions and make a video package that seemed like it was actual coverage at the convention from an outlet called Game Smash, which didn’t exist. Then that first video went viral. And so I kept doing the character and kept exploring him, and now he’s appeared in any number of weird viral videos and a web series and a few short films and now a feature. So he’s a bit like my Ernest or my Pee-wee Herman. He’s become my alter ego.

Glen Dower:

I love him, I think he’s great. I just rewatched the movie and I definitely get some young Bobcat Goldthwait vibes from him: manic and lovable energy. You and I are very similar in age, do you think a lot of those comedic energies that we grew up with seeped into the character?

Andrew Bowser:

Oh, definitely Bobcat! And I think so, and some consciously and some subconsciously. Bobcat was very consciously an influence on me, and there was even a time when we were working on a television pilot for my character and we were looking for somebody to play Onyx’s father, and we reached out to Bobcat, and he was busy shooting a television show, so he couldn’t do it, but he was very sweet. But it’s definitely influenced by Bobcat.

There’s a heavy Kids in the Hall influence, especially Bruce McCullough from Kids in the Hall, and then Amy from Strangers with Candy was another big influence. And as I’ve already said, Paul Reubens. Paul Reubens was probably, now I realize, the largest influence, just because I’ve been heading toward more world-building with Onyx. I realize now I’m trying to create my own little playhouse to live in.

Glen Dower:

There is a danger that people might turn their nose up about, oh, it’s a YouTube character, it’s just going to be a sketch that is stretched out. And I can say, no, you’ve got one hour, fifty minutes runtime. You really built a world here. And was that a conscious decision? ‘I’m going to make a movie, I’ve got the opportunity, I’m going to make a film, not just stretch out a YouTube video here?’

Andrew Bowser:

Well, definitely, but what’s interesting about me is I was a filmmaker prior to YouTube’s existence, so it’s weird. I felt like I was a filmmaker who had to pivot because the landscape of the industry was shifting. And so I started putting videos on the internet, but I’ve always been a filmmaker first. Then my job in Los Angeles to survive was being a producer and editor for these videos. These are nerdy video outlets. That just became the space that I understood that became the space that I wanted to experiment in with characters and film.

And so yeah, it’s weird then to have a film at Sundance and the language be YouTuber turned filmmaker, and I’m like, I’m an elder millennial. I had to be told what YouTube and I had to be convinced that YouTube would matter. And so I’m fine with it. But at the same time, I think it’s important to point out that because I think there can be a chip on my shoulder and other people’s shoulders if they’ve put their content on these different platforms that they could be pigeonholed.

But the truth is, I wouldn’t have raised the money to make this film if I hadn’t put Onyx on TikTok because he got a million followers and those followers became Kickstarter backers. Nobody in Hollywood was going to finance my Onyx film. So it took me being savvy and changing with the ever-changing platforms to ever make the movie that I’m sure I thought I’d make when I was twenty-three when I went to film school.

I was like, well, I guess I’ll just be the next Kevin Smith and well Tarantino. But then that all kind of went away, the independent filmmaker route of just making your films and going to festivals until you kind of grew and grew. So I had to go through via the internet and then back into the film and festival world. It was just very necessary.

And so to your question, yes, in making the film, I’ve made three other features and I very much wanted to make it clear that my interest is in story and structure and pacing and all, and tone, consistency, tonal consistency is a big deal for me. And thematic relevance is a big deal for me, even though this is a movie about demons and wiener jokes. So I was very conscious of trying to make a real effort so that I’d be looked at as a filmmaker and not just an internet comedian.

Glen Dower:

Another big point was where, maybe YouTubers and maybe in the SNL actors would go into a movie and make it all about them, but you’re not, you’ve constructed a really great ensemble around you. Was that also part of your process?

Andrew Bowser:

It was part of the process, but I think it was also just necessary for me to, with Onyx – having performed the character for so long – bring new elements into his world to excite me as a filmmaker and as a director and performer. But it’s a lot more interesting for me to have scene partners and fun people to play with than to make a 90-minute movie of Onyx, where he’s just falling over.

I mean, he falls over plenty in the film, but other things happen too. So it was necessary for my interest in the piece. Also with the creature design, if I hadn’t incorporated Adam Doherty’s work, I think the making of this film would be less exciting and less stimulating to me. I needed to push myself in regard to just how many departments and how many new assets we could play with.

Glen Dower:

Like you say, it’s a comedy horror. Why did you take Onyx in that direction specifically?

Andrew Bowser:

That was because, as I said, I couldn’t get a film going traditionally, I had had interest over the years when Onyx would go viral at different times, but it would always be, could you take Onyx and place them into a context that makes sense for us? So what’s the Onyx Ali G show or what’s the Onyx Punked show? Or is there an Onyx Christmas movie because we got to fill a slot, maybe an Onyx Hallmark movie, which sounds like a great idea?

So, none of that ever happened, and I sat down and I thought that if I was going to make a proper feature – because my other films were very experimental, and found footage or mockumentary, non-traditional storytelling – that if I wanted to make a traditional film, it has to be with Onyx. It’s going to have to be crowdfunded. And the only leverage I have with the internet is Onyx, and no one is asking me to do this.

So what genre do I care about most? And that would be a horror comedy, and that would be Fright Night, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, etc, etc. So it was just a natural evolution of nobody asking me to make the movie except for myself and the 7,500 fans who backed it. That’s just the genre that I wanted to see him have his big adventure in.

Glen Dower:

And well chosen. It really made me laugh. And you’re the writer as well for the movie, of course. How much of it was improvised? One line I’m still laughing at is when he’s going behind the painting again and he gets stuck in the cobwebs and says something like, ‘Argh! How come these are exactly in line with the human mouth?!

Andrew Bowser:

Right, right. The funny thing is, because Onyx speaks so quickly, and he’s also very verbose, I don’t improvise. There’s barely any improvisation. Every word and breath is mapped out, even down to the cobweb jokes. And so much so that we would do takes, and my DP would say, do you want to try one any different? I would just do the same line reading, the same energy, the same pace because Onyx is baked into me at this point. He kind of says things each thing one way, and that’s it. There’s not much exploration to be done.

But the only time there would be improv would be maybe at the end of a scene if I felt like there wasn’t a strong enough button. Also, the editor and I made most of my living staying in LA as an editor. So editing is very important. The timing of a joke, the quickness, or the lengthy stay in a joke. So sometimes we’d get to the end of a scene and I would say there’s not a strong enough out, what else could I do here? And I’d improvise, but there’s not much.

Glen Dower:

Okay. Wow, that’s really interesting. The films you mentioned, are my loves too, Gremlins 2 I grew up on, the Ghostbusters movies I grew up on, so you have that feel. I’m guessing you insisted on practical as we can with all of these and keep that eighties, nineties aesthetic as well.

Andrew Bowser:

The truth is I always knew I wanted to do a lot of practical effects, but I still thought that certain elements would be heightened with CG or CG would be I guess more utilized than it wound up being. It wasn’t until I sent the script to the creature designer Adam, that I asked him to read it and consider designing the beefy bad boy. And he read it and said, well, what if they were all puppets, even the ghouls because I had pictured the ghouls as makeups. And as soon as he said, well, what if they were all puppets? Puppets?

I realized that’s much more in line with the aesthetic that I told myself I was aiming for. And that’s also, again, it’s why it’s important to listen to department heads and collaborators. I think Adam’s work is just as much responsible for the personality of the film as the Onyx business of it all. And it was really Adam that came up with that idea. And then we did every creature except for some makeup in the music video and towards the end of the film. But almost every creature wound up becoming a puppet.

Glen Dower:

And they’re all so much fun. Let’s talk about the real characters, your cast. So we’ll just go through some highlights. I really enjoyed TC Carson as Mr. Duke, that dude’s voice. Wow.

Andrew Bowser:

I know, he’s so wonderful. He’s wonderful at everything. He’s so dialed in. And he would do certain lines, he would deliver them a way, where I realized, ‘Oh, that’s me in that scene.’ I might’ve written an Onyx button, but the way Mr. Duke delivered that was actually better to cut on. And also, he’s great at exposition.

Glen Dower:

So much gravitas.

Andrew Bowser:

Right gravitas, ‘this legend leads to this and this map will unlock that’ and he was great at selling that. And every line of dialogue from him felt like a trailer moment. And he was just a joy. I mean, without giving any spoilers away, there were definitely sequences where he had to be in uncomfortable situations, and he was such a trooper the whole time.

Glen Dower:

Of course, our readers might know him from Final Destination 2, and also the voice of Mace Windu in the animated Star Wars series. So he’s had at all. I really enjoyed Olivia Taylor Dudley. She is so dialed in as well, isn’t she? All the cast are really dialed into this. There’s no one winking at the audience, they’re all having fun, of course. But we rely on them to deliver the truth if you like.

Andrew Bowser:

Yes. Well, that was the conversation that I had with each of them was that Onyx’s world is absurd, but it’s emotionally grounded. So we don’t do much winking and we don’t do much undercutting of circumstance or undercutting of consequence. The stakes are meant to feel pretty high and real and then matched with puppets. And my cartoonish performance, hopefully, there’s a fun little alchemy that happens. Everybody, they all understood that. And nobody was leaning too hard into the bits or the comedy. And I feel like it doesn’t ever push too far into kind of nothing against this, but kind of pure sketch comedy fill where everyone’s a cartoon character and everyone’s elastic, and everyone can get hit with an Acme anvil and bounce back. I think it stays in a nice emotionally grounded place.

Glen Dower:

You yourself, you’ve done a little bit of work with Marvel’s Avengers, and I’m a big Marvel guy…\

Andrew Bowser:

Oh yeah?!

Glen Dower:

So what do you think of the future of Marvel? Do you think you have a place in there should the opportunity arise?

Andrew Bowser:

Oh gosh. I would love that. A lot of the work I do for them is short animated pieces, and we cover a lot of unknown history of certain Marvel properties. And we did a short episode about the X-Statix, and that tone is right at my alley. So if they ever do anything with the X-Statix, I’ll be eagerly putting my name in whatever I can get it in.

Glen Dower:

That’s great. And do we think we’ll see Onyx on the big screen again? Is that your hope?

Andrew Bowser:

I hope so. I think this film opened up a lot for me personally in regards to where I could see the character going and evolving and how the world could get even bigger. And I’ve already written half of the sequel, so I couldn’t help myself. And I think the title is technically longer by one or two letters. Oh, great. Yeah, so I would love that. I think doing this only gave me a taste to explore the cinematic version of this character further.

Glen Dower:

Well, Andrew, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a real pleasure, as was your movie. And enjoy Spain.

Andrew Bowser:

Thank you very much and thanks so much for your time too. Thank you.

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