Chop Top. Ash the android. Harry Cooper. Doctor Pretorius. Doctor Chilton. Doctor Raglan. Stathis Borans. Butterball. Bub and Captain Rhodes. Everyone who isn’t Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby.
Horror movies are full of secondary assholes, people who may not be the most dangerous threat but prove that, even when pitted against supernatural horrors, humans will find a way to be the absolute worst.
We should acknowledge the truth: confused, aggressive buttholes are more dangerous than ghosts, demons and monsters will ever be. Another Evil is a new horror movie that takes this as its central lesson, creating a new horror icon in the process.
Os is that secondary threat taken to its natural limit. If humans are to toy with the occult, the arcane and the supernatural, aren’t we more likely to be damned by the people who fancy themselves experts in that hidden world, rather than the obscure, nebulous extradimensional entities? This is Os in a Ouija sentence: the man you bring in to save you from evil brings human corruption with him.
If there’s any justice in horror movie fandom, Os will be remembered as one of the landmark characters in 2000-teens horror movie history. Here are his stats for the inevitable Another Evil collectible card game or Con cosplayer, compiled with the help of Another Evil director Carson D. Mell and Os himself, actor Mark Proksch.
Name: Os Bjorn
Occupation:
Ghost Hunter. According to Another Evil director and writer Carson D. Mell, Os is likely a member of “a secret society of magicians,” the kind of guy who thinks “the people who go to the Magic Castle in LA are phonies” and “dabbles in real magic sometimes.”
Personality:
Os is over-earnest and open. This can be sweet when he’s honest about his foibles, less so when he’s telling, unprompted, the story of his tawdry, gory, one night stand with Satan. Os is often unaware of how overbearing he can be, deploying ghost hunting gadgets like conversational bludgeons and confusing people into rhetorical submission.
Os is also damaged, more so than most people. “He’s a silly character, he’s funny, but he’s flawed. To me that’s what real life is,” Proksch said. “Differences are what makes things funny.”
For Proksch, capturing Os’ essence required a complete commitment to embarrassment. Os is an open guy, prone to naked meditation, drunken breakfasts and the dangerous certainty that the briefest human contact spells real friendship. “When I’m doing weird stuff if I don’t commit it’s just going to look bad and dumb and I would call it out immediately if I saw it on screen,” Proksch said. “You can’t do comedy and have any vanity at all. People that do it, they don’t make me laugh. People who try to look good and do comedy, it’s just not very interesting. It’s stupid to me.”
Mell agreed about what was required in bringing Another Evil to life, describing “full commitment” as “the only type of humor I like.” For Mell, Os “seems like a creep you don’t want to be around in real life.”
Skills:
Os understands occult ritual. Or, at least, he’s good at giving that appearance. When he’s scanning a room for spectral energies, there’s no doubt that he’s responding to something. As a ghost hunter Os is no scam artist.
Rather than pulling his ghost traps from dusty occult tomes, Os has developed (or bought) devious traps with their own internal logic. Who needs magic circles, spells of binding and magic crystals when Os knows a simple truth: lost souls crave the pleasures of life. Sometimes all it takes is a lure of chicken and wine.
According to the director of Another Evil, “there’s a methodology to each trap.”
These methods vary from a tri-nested box, the center box cursed by a corrupt priest (Want a priest to curse something? Get ready to bribe him.), to a Zardoz crystal that traps the offending spirit in its many facets.
Once again, Os demonstrates a potent blend of earnestness and gullibility. Do the traps work? Or are they powered only by Os’ conviction? The writer and director is as uncertain as the viewer. “When Os is being sold these traps he can’t afford for a lot of money, the guys are lying to him about it,” Mell said, then gave it some more thought. “Or maybe they weren’t. But whoever has designed these things have really come up with some bullshit.”
Still, when Os and Dan (Steve Zissis) capture their first ghost, you’ll believe just as hard as they do. Os “puts everything he’s got into his industry.”
Vices:
At first glance, Os seems most trouble by alcohol, but Proksch says his character’s problems run deeper. “I’m from Wisconsin and we are drinkers and I’ve known a handful of people who are messes. And they make pretty bad decisions and the drinking doesn’t help,” Proksch said. “They’re much more nuanced and for whatever reason they need to drink to justify their bad decisions and what’s the consequences that come from that, but it’s kind of what came first, the chicken or the egg.”
For Proksch, Os’ drinking enables his most dangerous and powerful ability: complete conviction in his intuition. This makes him a powerful ghost hunter and draws him closer to the spiritual realms, but it leaves him without filters. Os can’t separate his real abilities from his intuitive bullshit. Even more dangerously, Os will follow his instincts with complete certainty, no matter the consequences, especially when drinking.
Couture:
Os wears black leather and a dark fedora, tucking his black shirts and sweaters into his black jeans. Occasionally he needs to vibe on spectral energies by stripping naked, but he prefers black pajamas. Proksch described Os’ lived-in sleepwear as “washed a million times… washed and wash and washed.” Os is a man who found his look and has stuck with it over the years. Pins on his jacket imply a secret history.
Nemesis:
A great horror character is nothing without his opposite. For Os this mirror image is Joey Lee Dancing, another ghost hunter. “He’s sloppy. He’s lazy. He’s a total bleeding heart when it comes to ghosts. I mean, he’s always on their side. Every time. Just fuck that. Fuck Joey,” Os says. They have a fundamental disagreement that reaches to the heart of their industry. While Joey sees ghosts as amoral extradimensional beings, Os believes most ghosts to be “Demons… with a capital D.”
Mell sees Joey Lee as “the opposite end of the spectrum” from Os, but said, “I don’t know if he’s correct or not. It’s just his interpretation of events.”
Sins:
It doesn’t make it into Another Evil, but according to Mell, one of the incidents precipitating Os’ offscreen divorce from his wife was that “he burned up his cats accidentally.”
That’s just the beginning of Os’ troubled past. Most tellingly, he bonked Satan. You’ll have to watch Another Evil to hear that horrifying tale.
Os' monologue in ANOTHER EVIL is practically Jaws-caliber. #sxsw
— Curtis Woloschuk (@CurtisWoloschuk) March 13, 2016
This is just a preliminary sketch of Os Bjorn, one of the most compelling horror movie characters of the decade. If Another Evil catches on with horror fans, we’ll be talking about Os for years to come.
