That ink­ing feel­ing: Evil Dead Rise and the hor­ror of tattoos

When Stu (Ed Helms) wakes up in a Bangkok bath­room in The Hang­over Part II, he has a sore head not just because of his stink­ing hang­over but also because of the trib­al mark scraped into his face the night before. The 2011 comedy’s per­spec­tive on tat­too­ing is typ­i­cal of cin­e­ma and under­scores a recur­rent soci­etal con­cern about the prac­tice: permanence.

Echoed in such scenes are all the ques­tions tat­tooed peo­ple are asked by their unspoiled peers: you know that’s there for­ev­er, right? Isn’t that irre­spon­si­ble? What’s it going to look like when you’re old­er? (Yes, no, and sick, thanks.) In hor­ror, though, tat­too scenes make their mark not just with con­ser­v­a­tive scare tac­tics but through famil­ial trau­ma and gen­dered violence.

In Yasu­zo Masumura’s 1966 Japan­ese goth­ic Irezu­mi (Japan­ese for ​“Tat­too”), Otsuya is sold to a geisha house and told by its own­er to ​“feed on men” to make him rich. Cap­tured in stun­ning close-ups, her milk-white skin is then brand­ed by mas­ter artist Sei­kichi, who hand-pokes across her back a gold­en orb-weav­ing spi­der with a grotesque woman’s face.

The spi­der, Sei­kichi says, ​“will kill count­less lusty men” and Otsuya ​“will gorge on their corpses”. Otsuya becomes a man-eater, spin­ning webs, lay­ing traps and leav­ing a trail of bro­ken, blood­ied men in her wake. She blames the spi­der for her actions, even after wield­ing the blade herself.

The film con­nects con­tem­po­rary fears about body art and women’s sex­u­al lib­er­a­tion to the folk­loric spi­der jorōgu­mo, a shapeshifter said to take the form of a beau­ti­ful woman in order to ensnare men. Irezu­mi toys with the super­nat­ur­al, ask­ing whether it’s the venge­ful sex slave or the blood-suck­ing spi­der that is the movie’s true mon­ster. It’s nei­ther. ​“Men have made me this way,” says Otsuya.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea is no dif­fer­ent. In the open­ing scenes of this dream­like ​“video nasty” from 1976, pro­tag­o­nist Mol­ly and her nephews pass a shady-look­ing board­walk par­lour. ​“You don’t want tat­toos,” she says. ​“They don’t come off.” But didn’t Grand­pa have tat­toos? ​“No,” says Mol­ly. ​“He couldn’t have. He was a good man.” As Mol­ly ram­bles about her ​“untouched” and ​“per­fect” father, the cam­era lingers on a mer­maid design in the shop window.

After sev­er­al sequences of sex­u­al vio­lence wrought against male bod­ies, Mol­ly has the mer­maid inked across her abdomen. Its mean­ing is man­i­fold: beau­ty and beast; love and vio­lence; calm waters and rag­ing tem­pests. Mol­ly doesn’t flinch as she’s being tat­tooed but, as she talks wist­ful­ly about get­ting ​“lost at sea” with her father, the film flash­es back to deaf­en­ing­ly silent scenes of two peo­ple hav­ing sex, their iden­ti­ties unclear.

The root of Molly’s mania is dis­closed in the cli­mac­tic flash­back, in which an infant Mol­ly is raped by her father, whose cli­max caus­es him to have a heart attack and col­lapse on top of her. When she rolls away her father’s corpse, we see the mer­maid across his own abdomen. Here, the tat­too is a kind of trans­fer, a graph­ic expres­sion of a psy­cho­log­i­cal imprint. They don’t come off indeed.

Jack Drac­u­la, the film’s tat­too artist, looks every bit the sea­side creep, but at least his par­lour has a bed. In San­ta San­gre, Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s sur­re­al­ist Mex­i­can gial­lo from 1989, things are a lit­tle more primitive.

“Stop cry­ing like a lit­tle girl,” says Orgo to his young son, Fenix. ​“I’ll give you a charm. That’ll make you a man.” Orgo, a cir­cus impre­sario, lothario and knife-throw­er, binds Fenix to a wood­en chair and applies a tat­too, stick-and-poke style, with a knife dipped in ink. When it’s over, Fenix has an eagle spread across his chest, just like his dad. ​“There. Now you’re a man.”

But Orgo isn’t ​“a man” for much longer. When he’s caught car­ry­ing on with his tar­get girl – tall, intense­ly sex­u­al and tat­tooed from face to feet – Fenix’s moth­er muti­lates him by pour­ing acid on his crotch. Orgo lops off her arms in retal­i­a­tion, before slash­ing his own throat in front of Fenix.

As an adult, Fenix suf­fers hal­lu­ci­na­tions and role­plays as his par­ents – the film is like a flash sheet of Freudi­an the­o­ries. (Fenix is played by Jodorowsky’s sons Adán and Axel – make of that what you will.) In the end, Fenix expels the ghosts of his past and his eagle, sym­bol­i­cal­ly at least, flies away – trau­ma exorcised.

These hor­ror films depict the tat­tooed as deviants, and many more movies reveal a deep dis­trust of – or dis­gust with – the peo­ple at either end of the nee­dle, but few go so far as to depict them as actu­al demons.

In Lit­tle White Lies edi­tor David Jenk­ins’ rap­tur­ous review of Evil Dead Rise, he cel­e­brates direc­tor Lee Cronin’s ​“desire to make each body a new can­vas for some sick-mak­ing muti­la­tion”. Once again, ​“can­vas” is the oper­a­tive word. Ellie is a sin­gle moth­er of three and a self-employed tat­too artist – in that order. When we meet her, she is mak­ing adjust­ments to her tat­too machine while field­ing ques­tions from daugh­ter Brid­get. Par­ent­ing is clear­ly infring­ing on her career, and the scene qui­et­ly sets up one of the movie’s most sig­nif­i­cant scares.

When Ellie becomes a con­duit for an ancient and glee­ful evil, it has a rad­i­cal effect on her atti­tude to moth­er­hood. ​“I’m free now,” she tells Brid­get. ​“Free from all you tit­ty-suck­ing par­a­sites.” Then, Ellie makes Brid­get her can­vas. The pos­sessed matri­arch snatch­es her tat­too machine and plunges it into her own tem­ple, effec­tive­ly dip­ping the nee­dle in demon ink, before rak­ing it across her daughter’s face.

While many films fea­ture women as the recip­i­ents of tat­toos and/​or vic­tims of tat­tooists, few let women wield this inti­mate pow­er them­selves. The machine is the tool with which Ellie earns mon­ey to raise her kids. It embod­ies the career she might have had had she not had chil­dren, which in the US – and many oth­er coun­tries – has a dra­mat­ic impact on women’s career plans and earn­ings. Here, Ellie is thrust­ing into the face of her ​“par­a­sitic” off­spring years of unex­pressed rage, unre­ward­ed self-sac­ri­fice, and resent­ment about a life unlived – trau­ma exer­cised. As in The Witch Who Came from the Sea and San­ta San­gre, the assault rep­re­sents a trans­fer­ral. Soon after, the ink spreads beneath Bridget’s skin until it gush­es from her ori­fices and she too becomes a demon. Moth­er has infect­ed daughter.

As Ellie’s pos­ses­sion inten­si­fies, it is evi­dent that her trans­for­ma­tion is more lit­er­al than that of the spi­der-tat­tooed Otsuya in Irezu­mi. Not only does Ellie crawl around on the ceil­ing but, by the finale, she is lit­er­al­ly a spi­der-like creature.

As in Cronin’s 2019 debut fea­ture, The Hole in the Ground, the hor­ror of Evil Dead Rise hinges upon a freaky infes­ta­tion with­in the fam­i­ly unit. The moth­er-daugh­ter tat­too reflects famil­ial anx­i­eties in the house­hold, in the mind and in the body. Tat­toos hurt but noth­ing gets under the skin like a mother’s scorn.