Behind the Scenes

The Tattoo was the first of the three August 2018 productions to lock one of its key cast members.

Within minutes of Becker Von Felsburg taking over producing duties for the Welcome to the Strange slate, he was on the phone with Sasha Boggs, securing her for the role of Christine. Daryl was eager to work with her again, and when she arrived in the Bay Area, he and Becker picked her up at SFO and took her to lunch at Flights in Burlingame before production began.

The schedule around the film was unusually compressed. Number Nine had already started shooting when The Tattoo went into production. After that came The Neighbor, and only then did the group return to finish Number Nine. For a brief stretch, all three films were being built almost on top of one another.

Casting fell into place quickly. Chris Ross was a natural fit for Chip, the air-headed himbo who spends much of the script shirtless. Brian Grima played against him as Ted, giving the pair an intentionally awkward anti-chemistry that worked well enough to be repeated later when they returned as Detective Hickey and CSI Marlowe.

Michael Martin wanted to get back on set, so he was brought in as the third friend in the flashback scenes. On the main shoot day, he also handled behind-the-scenes photography and, just as importantly, secured burritos for lunch.

Daryl’s aunt Vicky joined the cast as the gypsy biker witch, complete with fake tattoos. The Nieder family’s tattoo shop was used for one of the film’s locations, and the tattoo designs themselves carried more personal material into the frame. One temporary tattoo was based on an old drawing Daryl had made of Becker years earlier. Makeup artist Aaron Van Lieu created the special makeup work for the film and also appears briefly as the tattoo artist.

The script had been written by John Andreini and originally built toward a classic short-horror twist: Chip’s one-night stand is revealed to be some kind of monstrous woman, a demon, zombie, succubus, or whatever exact category she might belong to.

Daryl liked the setup but felt he had seen that basic structure too many times before. He wanted the ending to keep going past the expected reveal and become funnier by refusing to stop where a conventional horror short would.

His first idea was even bigger. Chip would decide to stay with Christine despite her monstrous form, and the film would smash cut to a Christmas card on their refrigerator showing the two of them married with triplet demon children. Sasha vetoed it, so the ending was rewritten on the spot. Instead, the movie cuts to immediately after Chip and Christine have slept together, with Christine still in full monster form and Chip already trying to get her out of the house by calling her an Uber.

Andreini appeared to approve of the final result, at least in the brief exchange he and Daryl had after the premiere. He had traveled from Portland to San Francisco to see the anthology, and as he exited the theater he told Daryl that he liked what they had done with The Tattoo. No mention of The Neighbor though, which he also wrote, so maybe that adaptation wasn’t as lucky.

The film also holds a small place in Dollars & Donuts history as the first production to include an actual sex scene, albeit only as a brief POV flashback of Christine. Later films such as The Sadder but Wiser Boy and Blonde Ambitions would push things much further.

The Tattoo went on to become one of the stronger festival performers from the anthology, playing widely and collecting a number of awards. The most memorable screening came at Terror on the Plains in Kansas City, where the film was projected on a drive-in screen during a thunderstorm. Lightning flashed beyond the screen throughout the movie, seeming at times to land in perfect sync with the action. For a film built around the collision of horror and comedy, it was difficult to imagine a better setting.