At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul – Enter the strange world of Coffin Joe!

Brazil, like many South American countries tends to have a very powerful Christian presence woven into its culture. Even in 2013, the influence of the Catholic Church casts an enormous shadow and one doesn’t have to look far in Rio de Janeiro to see the colossal statue of Christ the Redeemer surveying the city. Given the predominance of religious influence that exists in Brazil today, it’s safe to say that fifty years ago, religion was still a huge part of the Brazilian culture, despite the passage of time since the 1960s allowing for an increase in secular views in a wider global context.

Imagine then, how shocking it would have been for a low budget, independent horror film to be unleashed on an unsuspecting society as religiously motivated as the Brazilian, with a main character who mocks the Church and defiles many taboos not only with apparent relish, but with an almost unrestrained pathological hatred and antagonistic insidiousness.

José Mojica Marins’ Coffin Joe is an incredibly confronting character for those of a religious disposition. Even today, the acts depicted in the Coffin Joe series of films are very over the top, let alone for the 1960s. For the uninitiated, Marins is a Brazilian filmmaker who made a few very underground and obscure films in Brazil in the post war years before creating the iconic Brazilian horror character he would become best known for – Coffin Joe. Utilizing incredible ingenuities (such as creating ghosts on screen by painstakingly putting glitter on film negatives, frame by frame), Coffin Joe would go on to appear in many of Marins’ subsequent films and would predate the more well-known antihero/villains of horror such as Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, etc. many years before they appeared on screen.

Coffin Joe is in many ways an avant garde character. He doesn’t believe in God (an atheistic perspective), he’s misanthropic and sadistic who believes religion is for the ignorant, the inferior and the superstitious and he seems to delight in howling mockery at the cross. Marins has stated that Coffin Joe does believe in the power of the mind and strength of will, of achievement through perseverance./p>

That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s portrayed as being overly noble however…quite the opposite. Achievement to Coffin Joe equates to impregnating women in order to produce a child, thus preserving his legacy of evil and perpetuating an attempt at immortality through his offspring.

Marins initially didn’t want to play the character and was convinced by a makeup assistant to do it. As a younger man, he claims to have been very religious but the woman he loved was raped by a priest in confession. Hence, his dissent of the Church through Coffin Joe stems from this incident. Due to Marins’ not holding the character back, the first Coffin Joe film À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma/At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1963) and its sequel Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver/This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) were always doomed to be heavily censored. Marins himself claims the censorship “killed” the movie(s). In addition to being censored, he was jailed by the Brazilian dictatorship in the mid-60s. How’s that for suffering for your art?

A list of demands from the censors as well as an interview with the man can be seen here:

Coffin Joe is definitely what could be considered “cult horror.” In many ways he’s almost the definition of the term. In an amusing turn of phrase from the interview above, Marins states that “what was once trash is now cult.” How true. If you want an overview of the films and the character, the following trailer can oblige but it does contain some spoilers:

http://cinemassacre.com/2009/10/15/15-coffin-joe-1963/

 Ultimately though, no overview can compare to the real thing, so check out At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul:

And if you think that’s wild for what Coffin Joe was up to in the 1960s, in 2008 Marins released what he considers his masterpiece – Embodiment of Evil. which would probably give PETA a fit due to the scenes involving a dead pig, rats, spiders and cockroaches. Weird or strange don’t begin to describe Coffin Joe films. They could be dismissed as simply gore porn or antireligious babble. Marins might be truly mad. Whatever the case though, if you like horror, these are mandatory watching.