Behind the Scenes

By the summer of 2018, Dollars & Donuts had suddenly found itself moving faster than it had in years. Monkeys wrapped at the end of June, and instead of slowing down, Daryl and Becker Von Felsburg pushed straight into three more horror shorts and a set of elaborate wraparounds designed to tie them together into a feature-length Halloween presentation. The idea became Welcome to the Strange.

The wraparounds were filmed under a very different kind of deadline. Kirsten Della was only two weeks away from giving birth to their second son, Eli, but she was still game to spend the night helping anchor the production alongside Daryl. Their first son, Henry, then two years old, also appeared on camera for the first time.

The set quickly became a family affair. Henry filmed his scenes first, wandering among costumes, props, and adults trying to make a horror movie around him. Once his material was finished, he was taken to spend the night with his grandparents, Hank and Nina Della, leaving the rest of the cast free to move into the more chaotic adult portion of the shoot. Henry, by most accounts, stole the show.

His presence also gave the wraparound story more emotional weight than a simple family cameo. By this point, Daryl was increasingly pulling from the real personalities, relationships, and anxieties of the people around him. That could be funny, but it could also be exposing. If he was going to ask collaborators to put that much of themselves into the work, he felt he had to be willing to do the same. Becoming a father had given him an obvious fear. The worst thing he could imagine was losing his son. So that became the heart of the story.

The wraparound itself was conceived as a loving Treehouse of Horror-style Halloween special, with Daryl and Kirsten hosting a costume party that gradually collapses into supernatural madness. The Loyalists arrived in full costume. Ray Revello came as a Wolfman. Becker Von Felsburg appeared as a skeleton. Michael Martin arrived as Dracula, with Brian Grima as a pirate and Sinéad Madden as a gender-swapped Freddy Krueger. Chris Ross showed up dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog. That wasn’t a costume created for the movie. He already owned it. Naturally, the script rewarded him by having the door slammed in his face.

Even Mitchell Martin, who was away in Cabo San Lucas, found his way into the finished film. A cell-phone clip of Mitch dancing around a stripper pole was repurposed to answer Becker’s question, “Where’s Mitch?” The wraparound story was ambitious for a single night’s shoot. Michael is sent into the garage to stash beer and discovers Lorenzo Ocon chained up inside a Saw-style trap. Meanwhile, a cursed book begins demanding a soul in exchange for releasing an ancient spirit.

That spirit was played by Lori Carsillo, although Lori was never actually on set with the rest of the cast. Her material was filmed separately against green screen and composited into the party footage later, allowing the production to create a much larger supernatural event than had physically existed on the night.

The finale pushed everything farther. Ray and Becker offer themselves to the book in order to save Henry, while Lorenzo is forced to hack off his own foot to escape the garage. By the end, the party has completely collapsed into screaming, blood, sacrifice, and outtakes rolling under the credits. The blood itself had already started becoming a visual habit.

Monkeys had ended with Tara Erickson and Gino Vigil drenched in gore after Bobo’s improvised final attack, and the new horror shorts kept finding excuses to finish in similarly excessive fashion. Nobody had planned a recurring motif, but by the time Welcome to the Strange came together, the blood-soaked endings felt like a signature.

Somehow, the summer plan worked. Between the end of June and October, Daryl and Becker had completed three new horror shorts, shot the wraparound material, and assembled the whole thing into a feature-length premiere package. The final stretch of post-production landed directly on Daryl’s birthday, October 21, which he spent in the editing room trying to drag the entire project across the finish line.

Four days later, on October 25, 2018, the cast and crew returned to the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco. The group coordinated their premiere outfits around Marvel characters, except for Ray Revello, who arrived as Snake Plissken from Escape from New York for reasons known only to Ray.

The film was dedicated to Henry T. Della, Daryl’s grandfather, who had died earlier that year. The night should have been celebratory. For Daryl, it became something else. His father, Hank Della, reacted badly to the finished film. Throughout the screening, Hank scoffed audibly, made faces at the screen, and appeared openly dissatisfied with what he was watching. Daryl suspected some of the hostility came from lingering resentment over changes made to Hank’s script for Number Nine, along with the company’s increasing willingness to work with outside writers.

After the screening, the tension became personal. Hank refused to speak to Daryl, declined to take a celebratory photograph, and kept a cold, drunken distance from the rest of the evening.

The final memory came outside the theater. Daryl offered to help his parents find a cab. They refused. He stood on the sidewalk and watched them disappear down the street, Nina drunkenly dancing around the corner while Hank followed behind without saying goodbye. Something about that image stayed with him.

All night, Daryl had been surrounded by the family he was building, the friends he was leading, the actors and collaborators who had thrown themselves into a ridiculous little horror anthology because he had asked them to. Then, at the end of it, he found himself watching his own parents stumble away from him into the dark.

The roles had changed. He had spent years looking toward them. Now he was standing on the other side of adulthood. He couldn’t have known how final the moment would feel in retrospect. It was the last Dollars & Donuts premiere Hank Della ever attended.