Horror Express: A Reencarnação do Sexo / ‘The Reincarnation of Sex’ (Luiz Castellini, 1982)

‘80s Brazilian sex-horror films don’t come down the pike very often round these parts, so you’ll need to forgive the total lack of cultural context and background info in the review that follows. But, sometimes, that’s the very best part of being a quote-unquote ‘cult movie fan’ isn’t it? Diving in blind and seeing what kind of three-headed guppy you come back up with. Suffice to say, ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’ is definitely a catch worth making a fuss about.

Story-wise, things get off to pretty mundane start here, as the father of a family living on a remote rural homestead becomes enraged when he overhears his daughter shagging the gardener. Dismissing his wife’s not unreasonable protestations that their daughter has the right to make her own decisions (and that the gardener’s not such a bad guy anyway), the father contrives to drive the gardener to an even more remote spot somewhere down the road, and murders him with an axe.

Thereafter, not for the last time, things get a little weird. The mother appears to take the daughter’s side in the ensuing familial conflict, and together they dig up the gardener’s body, re-burying his severed head in a potted plant, which the daughter then sits next to, looking distraught and rubbing her body with her dead beau’s blood. Subsequently, the daughter appears to become sick with grief, and dies.

SUDDENLY - ten years later! A sleazy estate agent sells a lease on the now empty homestead to a pair of virile young newlyweds. After they move in however, the wife og the couple begins hearing a creepy voice calling her name, emanating from a familiar plant pot in the living room (apparently the décor and contents of the house have remained unchanged over the preceding decade). As a result of this, the wife soon becomes sexually insatiable, exhausting her down-to-earth, wood-chopping husband and causing him to worry for her mental health, especially after she begins stripping off and masturbating at the plant pot-voice’s command.

Soon of course, the plant-voice’s demands become violent, and the wife’s uncle, called in by the husband to provide some help vis-a-vis her troubling behaviour, arrives to find his niece naked and blood splattered, waving the severed head of her husband around like a prize-winning pumpkin.

The next tenant the estate agent finds for the property is an emotionally troubled lesbian whose rich parents are paying for her to live in a rural retreat, apparently so she won’t embarrass them, and…. by this point, it’s pretty clear that ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’s flimsy supernatural plotline is basically just going to function as a delivery mechanism for near-constant sex and violence. If you’re comfortable with that though, strap in, because it’s gonna be one hell of a ride.

The sex here is of the Jess Franco-style ‘hard soft’ variety, which is to say, it’s clearly simulated, but the cast really go for it nonetheless, leaving little to the imagination, even as director Luiz Castellini tends to favour heavily shadowed long-shots over Franco’s more, uh, intimate approach to capturing the action on camera.

Once it gets going, the film’s tone is shamelessly prurient and exploitative (one of the high/low points [delete as applicable] involves the lesbian character’s lover bloodily choking to death on a vibrator), but, from your jaded correspondent’s perspective at least, the frequent, highly sexualised violence is presented in a manner which never really becomes overly sadistic or difficult to sit through.

It helps of course that the film is pretty well made, with an imaginatively lurid colour palette of toxic purples and greens and all manner of OTT ‘horror’ effects (thunder and lightning, crash-zooms etc) helping to accentuate the fantastical nature of the proceedings, leaving us in no doubt that we’re watching a a crazy, pulpy soft-porn bloodbath, rather than something which aspires to be genuinely degrading or upsetting.

Also adding greatly to the film’s atmosphere meanwhile is the music, which seems to consist of a series of needle drops taken from every LP the filmmakers’ could dig up which sounded creepy or discordant. The opening credits proudly proclaim “music by Vangelis, Penderecki and Pierre Henry”(!), but, hilariously, variations on Les Baxter’s theme from The Dunwich Horror (1970) play during most of the sex scenes.

As the movie goes on, things become increasingly phantasmagorical, eventually descending into total, blood-curdling delirium, as the haunted plant grows toward ‘Audrey II’-like proportions, swinging its rubbery tendrils around in delight, whilst it also receives assistance from the white-clad ghost of the daughter from the film’s prologue, who happily assists with the slaughter; when she’s not standing outside the house as the thunder roars, swinging the huge axe which once killed her lover around like a golf club, that is.

Once a VW vanload of happy-go-lucky hippies take shelter in the seemingly empty house and swiftly find themselves descending into an involuntary blood orgy, well…. all bets for a return to relative sanity are well and truly off, even as cut-aways to “the city” begin to show us the sleazy estate agents guy, in cahoots with the shaky-handed, wheelchair-bound father from the prologue, receiving some hassle from assorted relatives and survivors of the preceding massacres, who understandably want to see this shit sorted out once and for all… but you don’t really need to know about that, do you?

What you do need to know is that ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’ is staggeringly lurid, hypnotically repetitious and utterly bananas - clearly some kind of a landmark in worldwide-weird horror cinema, even as issues around music rights (aside from anything else) make it extremely unlikely that we’ll be seeing a legit re-release/restoration any time soon. If you’ve read this far without throwing your laptop aside in disgust though, consider it essential viewing. Seek and ye shall find. 

 

Deathblog: José Mojica Marins (1936 – 2020)

 And so, we bid farewell to José Mojica Marins, aka Zé do Caixão, aka Coffin Joe, who departed this life aged 83 on February 19th in São Paulo, presumably still cursing god and mocking the pathetic vanities of the human race, or so I’d like to think.

When I began this blog back in 2009, some of the first posts here consisted of my ineffectual attempts to come to terms with the truly inexplicable series of films Marins more or less single-handedly created through the ‘60s and ‘70s, and all these years later, they still collectively lurk somewhere in the back of my brain like repressed memories of some unresolved trauma.

I will certainly never forget the evening, back in my long gone student days, when I stayed up even later than usual to catch a one-off TV airing of Marins’ ‘O Despertar da Besta’ [‘Awakening of the Beast’, 1970], which – extraordinarily, in retrospect - was screening on Channel 4 in the UK, as part of a season of ‘global weird cinema’ or somesuch. To say I was unprepared for what I saw that night would be an understatement. To say that I’ve never been quite the same since however would not be much of an exaggeration.

Presumably working with a sum equivalent to the catering budget on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘The Holy Mountain’, Marins here produced a work which stands alongside it as the ne plus ultra of brain-breaking cinematic lunacy - and the fact that it is merely the icing on the cake of a fifteen year run of similarly disturbing, indigestible craziness, all produced for similarly miniscule budgets, under the nose of a repressive military dictatorship, no less - only adding to its power.

Although I’m of course aware that - in his mellower, later years at least - Marins was always keen to stress that the views and behaviour of his Zé do Caixão character, I’ve always felt that there is something distinctly unsettling about the fact the Coffin Joe enjoyed the status of a pop culture icon in Brazil – starring in a series of best-selling comic books, frequently appearing on TV, promoting ice lollies and making promotional public appearances, etc – whilst the films he was directing and starring in meanwhile played like the outpourings of a genuinely damaged mind.

Characterised by a sense of pill-popping intensity and nightmarish psychedelic disorinetation, a relentless appetite for misogynistic / misanthropic sadism, and a seemingly endless profusion of virulent, often incomprehensible, quasi-philosophical diatribes, delivered straight to camera by the director himself, these films are almost literally impossible to describe - they must be seen to be believed.

Whilst Marins’ first horror film, 1964’s ‘À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma’ [‘At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul’] to some extent retained the conventions of traditional gothic horror, his films became increasingly idiosyncratic and disjointed as his character’s popularity increased through the ‘60s. I’m unsure to what extent there is some kind of Brazillian cultural specificity at play here, but from an outsider’s POV at least, it is strange indeed to imagine Zé do Caixão’s teenage fans packing out their local picture houses with their ice cream and popcorn to enjoy an adventure with their favourite comic book character, only to be presented with something as deranged as ‘O Despertar da Besta’ or 1967’s equally indescribable ‘Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver’ [‘This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse’] .

Whilst watching these films, I’ve often reflected that, if I were the Chief of Police in São Paulo during the 1960s, and I happened to visit the cinema of an evening and saw one of these flicks, I would be inclined to instruct my people to keep a very close eye indeed on this guy’s activities. I mean, just look at this stuff for godssake - he clearly must be up to no good, one way or another!

In fairness to Marins, it could equally be argued that his unique vision of extremity within the horror genre was simply so far ahead of anything being attempted by his global contemporaries that it proved impossible to contextualise at the time. That he subscribed to the belief that horror needed to be genuinely horrific is obvious, and his Zé do Caixão alter-ego could likewise ultimately represent a pure nightmare figure – a black mirror embodiment of the worst of human egotism, espousing beliefs which for all we know may have been the direct opposite of those his creator held in real life.

Certainly, the grisly demise Coffin Joe tends to meet at the end of each of his films, and Marins’ decision to title his 2008 comeback film ‘The Embodiment of Evil’, would tend to support this theory; but if this were really the case, how could we explain the existence of a film like 1970’s ‘Finis Hominis’ (‘The End of Man’, 1970), a less extreme but no less peculiar non-horror outing which instead takes the form of a kind of satirical religious parable?

Playing multiple roles here, Marins spends much of the run-time ranting direct to camera, holding forth with messianic urgency in a manner not dissimilar to the hellfire-charred rhetoric heard in his horror films. Though his words frequently descend into the realm of absolute nonsense (insofar as can be judged from the questionable English sub-titles burned into the only extant prints, at any rate), the director – as always – seems frighteningly in earnest, seemingly trying to make some very profound metaphysical points about… something or other? Quite what though, who can possibly say.

(In attempting to make sense of Marins’ extraordinary output during 1970, it might be worth noting that Wikipedia lists both ‘O Despertar da Besta’ and ‘Finis Hominis’ as exemplars of Cinema da Boca do Lixo [‘Mouth of Garbage cinema’], a grass-roots / anti-establishment film movement which grew out of the slums of downtown São Paulo in the late 1960s, blending ‘new wave’ aesthetics and low budget guerrilla technique with shocking/exploitational pop subject matter… but, that seems like a whole other cultural rabbit-hole, perhaps best left for another day.)

Despite having seemingly thrown his battered top hat into the ring with some weird out-growth of the psychedelic counter-culture during this period however, Marins often seemed reticent to discuss the philosophical or autobiographical aspects of his works in later years, after his work was belatedly discovered by the English-speaking world in the 1990s.

Alhough a sequel to ‘Finis Hominis’ appeared in 1972, Zé do Caixão was soon back to scarifying his core audience with the increasingly bedraggled likes of ‘Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres’ [‘Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures’, 1976] and ‘Delírios de um Anormal’ [‘Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind’, 1978]. Even in these later, less otherworldly, films though, the genuine frisson of danger and madness – the sheer impossibility of trying to predict what might happen next – remained intact.

It may be a deathless cliché to proclaim “we will not see his like again” in obituary posts like this one, but I honestly can’t think of anyone for whom such an epitaph would seem more appropriate. In spite of the poverty and cultural isolation from which his work sprang, Marins’ understanding of, and contribution to, the aesthetics of horror cinema is vast beyond measure.

However frequently they might have done the rounds, circulating amongst fans of weird movies and outré culture, watching one of his films is still not an experience which cannot be entered into lightly. Like stumbling through the door to some forbidden netherworld you never even dreamed might exist, they will leave you feeling as if you’ve opened yourself up to possession by some slavering, unclean spirit, ready to show you things you’ve never seen before and, gods willing, will never see again.

A fond farewell then, to a true cinematic maniac.

Me n' Coffin Joe, Part # 3:This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967)

Three years after the success of “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul”, Ze Do Caixao returned to Brazil’s screens in a film that bears all the defining marks of a sequel, essentially revisiting the themes and structure of it’s predecessor, but with more violence, more sleaze, a longer running time and even more ranting, but losing the self-contained charm of the earlier film in the process, replacing it with the first full manifestation of the kind of wildly excessive, oneiric sadism that Jose Marins would make his trademark in the coming years.

Rather than being dispatched for good by the combined forces of supernatural justice at the end of “At Midnight..”, it seems that Coffin Joe was merely… uh, badly burned or something, and “This Night..” begins with him returning to his home town fully recovered after a spell in hospital, and absolved of his crimes by a rather shoddy looking court on the basis of a lack of evidence. And unfortunately for the human race, it seems Joe hasn’t learned a damn thing from his ordeals, as he’s immediately up to his old tricks, harping on endlessly about the sanctity of his bloodline and the foolishness of religious belief and so on. Some bloody use that turned out to be, sigh the wandering ghosts somewhere in the background.

Stretching the shaky continuity further, business at the undertakers must have been booming in Joe’s absence, as his funeral parlor now finds itself equipped with a standard issue hunchback assistant named Bruno (his school play level make-up job somehow makes the poor guy look more repulsive than professional effects ever would have done), and also with a new complex of underground torture dungeons. Convenient!

Marins’ production values seem to have taken a corresponding leap forward too, at least if we can judge by such yardsticks as more sets, more expansive framing, more actors, more special effects, etc. I was disappointed to note though that the claustrophobic, gothic atmospherics that so livened up “At Midnight..” have been misplaced along the way, ironically falling victim to the arrival of more professional lighting, and the decision to shoot most of the external scenes on location. Gone are the restrictive corridors of forest and swathes of shadow that Marins conjured up on his chicken shack soundstage, and instead we get, well… realistic daytime footage of the same fairly boring looking place in Brazil, much of the time.

Sadly, many of the interior sets follow suit. That said, Joe’s dungeon/laboratory/whatever set up is lovably goofy - real mad scientist 101, straight of an Al Adamson or Ted V. Mikels flick, with weird, seemingly gas-powered machinery, the good ol’ strap-down gurney and parrots (?!) flying around for some reason. Quite what the machinery is for is anyone’s guess, although Joe does proclaim “not sadism – science!” at one point in the film, so maybe he’s got something on the backburner a bit more methodical than just throwing snakes at ladies and hoping for the best. Anyway, with this notable exception, most of the other interiors just have a lot of brick and white walls standing in for the delightfully cluttered compositions of the earlier film, unfortunately. Ho hum.

“At Midnight..” also features a whole ton of padding and subplots which were absent from the one-track-mind narrative of the first film – in fact the damn thing’s jam-packed with wild and wooly antics involving local politics, a kind-hearted wrestler, fixed poker games, tavern brawls and all manner of scheming and duplicity which I won’t try and run down for you in this review or we’ll be here all day.

One of the film’s most surprising scenes comes early on, when Joe saves a young boy from being run down by a careless soldier on a motorbike. Given his batshit philosophies and general disdain for humanity, one would assume that Joe only seeks a child of his own for purely utilitarian ends, to act as a miniature continuation of himself. But here, as he plays with the kid at the side of the road and curses the cyclist for his lack of attention, we start to realise that Joe just really digs kids, and hates the way that social and religious forces compel them to grow up into adults that he deems weak and ignorant. This one brief scene, in which Joe is framed as the protective force standing between the children and the hapless, accident-prone grown ups, is (to my knowledge) the only moment in Jose Marins’ entire filmography in which the director’s alter-ego is made to seem even remotely sympathetic. That it is never elaborated upon or followed up as the film proceeds full steam ahead in the direction of seedy, misanthropic carnage, simply makes it all the more curious.

Anyway, fathering a son is still Coffin Joe’s foremost objective in life, only now he seems to be framing this desire in even more deranged and fascistic terms, declaring that his first born will be the leader of a new race of supermen, free from human weakness. Ever the man of action, Joe decides that the first step is to find a mother befitting of his high standards, and as such he immediately sets about kidnapping the town’s six most desirable women. This quickly accomplished, he deposits them in a purpose-built ladies’ dormitory that he seems to have stashed away in his tardis-like lair, and prepares to instigate the first of film’s two extended sequences of horrifying shenanigans, as he subjects his potential brides to a series of ‘ordeals’ to determine which of them is most worthy of his seed.

Admittedly, women weren’t given a great deal to do in the first Coffin Joe film prior to becoming victims, but it soon becomes clear in “This Night..” that the level of Jose Marins’ misogyny, or, at best, his lack of empathy toward the opposite sex, was absolutely staggering when he was making these films. Kidnapped by a freak, these six able-bodied women just sit there impassively in their nightgowns, failing to display any emotion or resistance whatsoever, as their captor rants away, explaining in his characteristically roundabout fashion that he basically intends to kill five of them, and to rape the lucky survivor.

Upping the ante on the spider-based murder of his wife from the first film, Joe waits until the girls are soundly asleep (cos hey, what else are they gonna do after the man’s left the room?), and unleashes a box full of tarantulas upon them in a queasy sequence that goes on far, far longer than is strictly necessary (“necessary” being a pretty redundant term with Marins at the controls), cutting between close-ups of giant spiders crawling across the bodies of writhing, terrified girls and Joe’s staring eyes and belly-laughing chops, his pet creatures clearly presented as a direct extension of his body, and of the camera’s gaze. Somewhere, there’s a psychoanalyst hitting the big red button under his/her desk, and we haven’t even got to the snakes yet.



Ah yes, the snakes. When Joe deems one of the girls worthy of survival because she wasn’t too bothered by the spiders, she gets to watch as her companions are locked in a narrow underground chamber and left to the mercy of a bunch of venomous vipers and boa constrictors. Shots of the snake attack are intercut with equally icky footage of Coffin Joe trying to force himself upon the surviving lady. When she breaks down and admits that she is less than enthused by this whole turn of events, Joe decides she is not free from ‘weakness’ after all and thus can never be the mother of his child. Oh well, ya win some, ya lose some.



What I found most bizarre in this sequence though is what happens when Joe shrugs off his disappointment and tells her she is free to go. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll report all this to the authorities?”, she asks. No, Joe tells her, for I can tell that you have fallen hopelessly in love with me and will henceforth do my bidding. And she does.

What the EEEnfernoo is going on here? I thought I was at least getting used to the fuzzy logic with which Jose Marins conducts his movies, but once again his cracked-in-the-head approach to human behaviour has left me speechless.


Later in the film, Coffin Joe meets another girl, the daughter of a wealthy local dignitary, and things become even more confoundingly ridiculous when she immediately attaches herself to Joe and begins parroting his patriarchal, survival-of-the-strong philosophies back to him without even being prompted and doesn’t seem to mind when he slaps her around, causing our man to take a drag on his pipe and look on contentedly, as if to say “well, I knew the gal for me would come along eventually”.

Rarely in any sphere of creative endeavor – even the most bone-headed of superhero comics or fan fiction – have I encountered such a complete inability on the part of a male writer to conceive of women as independent, decision-making beings.

Not that I’d wish to really launch a defense of Mojica Marins, whose filmmaking ethics are clearly about as questionable as the Shell answer-man, but what I think we have to realise when dealing with Marins’ movies is that once they’ve got their initial plot set-ups and exposition out of the way and allowed him to get his horror on, all semblance of human characterisation and real world cause & effect are totally outta the window. In some quarters, Marins is often compared to Bunuel and Jean Cocteau, and, whilst that’s a comparison we should be wary of taking too far, “This Night..”s relentless concentration on personal dream logic and unforgettably intense imagery certainly speaks of such.

To put it bluntly, when Coffin Joe is ‘in the zone’, all other characters in the film are reduced to little more than bodies that do what they’re told. All through the film, things either happen comically slowly or appear sped up with no apparent logic, people say things that make almost no sense whatsoever, and a discordant mixture of music cues and random noises blare away with little relation to the action onscreen. Basically, the whole thing is freaked out on a level that only the very strangest of global filmmakers are able to compete with, and if things end up being almost unbelievably offensive too, well hey, that’s all just grist to the big WTF mill as far as Mr Marins is concerned. For every viewer left un-appalled by one of his films, Ze Do Caixao must shed a tear of failure.

What he is essentially going for here is Hitchcockian “shock cinema” on a cruelly primitive level. He doesn’t give a damn whether or not the audience expect these girls (or any of the characters other than Coffin Joe for that matter) to be recognisable, sympathetic humans – hell, he’d probably have used mannequins instead, except they don’t scream or wriggle so well. The reaction he’s going for is simply to make us squirm in our seats and go ICK ICK ICK, GIANT HAIRY SPIDERS! and AAARGH, SNAKES! and OH MY GOD THAT’S HORRIBLE, and JESUS CHRIST, I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THAT IN MY LIFE BEFORE! And it is his overwhelming success in obtaining these reactions where so many other horror directors have failed that continues to make his work so unique, regardless of the fact that on a personal level he seems to dwell somewhere on the slippery slope between “socially maladjusted” and “out of his freakin’ mind”.

This can all be clearly seen in the sequence that viewers will remember most vividly from this film – Coffin Joe’s descent into Technicolor hell! Although in some ways a mere warm up for the utter mind-flaying Marins would inflect on the world a few years later in “Awakening Of The Beast” (which recycles the B&W to colour gimmick), “This Night..”s vision of hell is in some ways even more brutally extraordinary.

Put it this way: think about every film you’ve seen over the years that has portrayed a visit to hell. It’s usually pretty metaphorical, right? In the name of sanity and good taste, filmmakers will usually find some smart or abstracted means by which to portray the infernal regions, be it the bureaucratic hell of ‘The Screwtape Letters’, the hallucinatory hell-on-earth of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, the dopey S&M fantasies of ‘Hellraiser’ or the desert wasteland of Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’. Even the towering ode to literalism that is ‘Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey’ has the decency to present hell as a kind of stylized labyrinth in which we’re pursued by childhood fears.

But as we have surely gathered by now, sanity and good taste are not virtues held in high esteem by Jose Mojica Marins. If he’s going to take us to hell, he’s going to round up all the colour film stock, polystyrene, greasepaint and out of work actors his remaining budget can muster and take us to motherfucking HELL. And so, when Coffin Joe discovers that one of the women he murdered was pregnant, this sets him off on a predictably severe existential crisis which, combined with another one of those pesky peasant curses, sees him literally dragged through the ground, emerging in a garishly lit underground realm in which the legions of the semi-naked damned writhe in agony, being stabbed with pitchforks by red-skinned, loin-cloth clad demons!

Satan, also played by Marins (hey, why not?), sits upon his bloody throne, laughing uproariously as he zaps unfortunate sinners with lightning bolts, causing severed limbs to fly across the screen in a vision straight from the mind of a rabid eight year old boy. Rivers of stage-blood run through channels crudely hacked into the sets; naked women are bloodily crucified as boa constrictors crawl around their necks; floors and walls that looks like regurgitated pizza throb and moan with the torments of the damned; disconnected heads and body parts wave frantically through gaps in the ceiling. And meanwhile, cult film fans the world over proceed to foam at the mouth, fall off their chairs or manifest other suitably extreme reactions in sheer disbelief that their was some deranged guy with no money in the middle of Brazil actually MAKING THIS CRAP HAPPEN, AND FILMING IT.


It is a strange kind of joy to try to explain, that exquisite “I can’t believe I am actually seeing this” feeling. It’s not big, and it’s not clever, but it’s a form of joy all the same, and probably the reason I keep firing up movies like this when I could be doing something sensible.

Overall, I’m starting to get the impression that the cinema of Jose Marins is rather like being trapped inside the seething, sweaty mind of some leather overcoat-clad, catholic guilt-wracked teenager – you know, the kind you probably knew some variation of in school/college who quotes bowdlerised Nietzsche and seems to have a very high opinion of himself, but is cripplingly terrified/fascinated by the perpetually distant opposite sex.

It is not a place I can really recommend spending time, but on the other hand it does lead us into a hallucinogenic cavalcade of truly horrific horrors, realised with the kind of lingering intensity that makes you suspect Marins never got over his teenage disappointment that when you go to see a movie called, say, ‘Pit of Bloody Horror’, you rarely get to see eighty minutes-worth of pits full of bloody horror, and decided it was his personal destiny to make amends for this failure, in the name of prurient, emotionally-stunted horror fans everywhere. And so, for those of us with a hardy constitution and at least a certain fondness for the prurient, emotionally-stunted horror fan that lurks within us all (ok, some of us more than others), films like “This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” are irresistible, providing further proof, as if it were needed, that being out of one’s freakin’ mind can often convey just as many advantages upon an intrepid filmmaker as it can problems.

Me n' Coffin Joe, Part # 2:At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul (1964)

About halfway through the 2001 documentary “The Strange World of Mojica Marins”, Jose Mojica Marins gets around to discussing the making of his debut cinematic feature (and apparently the first horror film ever made in Brazil), the wonderfully titled “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul”. Marins admits that he was whacked out of brain on cheap amphetamines throughout the production, working non-stop for 48 or 72 hours at a stretch, using two crews who rotated around him in 12 hour shifts. “I fell into a hole in the set, and nearly broke my leg,” he recalls, “and everybody cheered – they thought I was going to have to stop. But I had them wheel me in on a stretcher, and I carried on filming! I showed them!” And that just about sums the guy up really.

As it happens, he became pretty successful as a filmmaker and media personality following this film, but it’s easy to suspect he would have carried on banging them out in exactly the same manner even if everyone in the world had collectively burst into tears and earnestly begged him to stop. In fact, I’m pretty sure he would have liked it even better that way, the big freak.

Regardless of your thoughts on the director’s wider work though (and to be honest, I feel like I’m taking my life in my hands every time I hit play on one of these DVDs after “Awakening of the Beast”), it’s hard not to recognise “At Midnight..” as a real accomplishment, not only in the way it transcends its zero budget, backyard origins through sheer strength of vision, but also as a singular cinematic expression of rampant egotism.

One thing that initially surprised me about “Midnight..” is that, despite his outlandish appearance, Marins’ Coffin Joe begins the film not as a villainous monster, but as a pretty regular guy. Ok, so the whole thing with the curly fingernails must freak people out a little, and he’s liable to fly off the handle at any moment and start ranting about his contempt for the church or somesuch, but aside from that he’s just a lad from this small town who’s made a career for himself as an undertaker. He’s got himself a pretty young wife, and even some buddies he likes to go out drinking with.

Not a bad state of affairs really, although you wouldn’t know it from the way he stomps about behind closed doors, glowering and cursing and demanding to eat meat on Holy Friday (a big no-no it seems). You see, Joe’s got a lot on his mind – namely, his own obsessively realised philosophy of materialistic Social Darwinism. Vehemently denying the existence of God to anyone who will listen, Joe believes that man can only become strong by throwing off the shackles of religion and adopting a strict survival-of-the-fittest approach to life, devoid of ‘weak’ sentimentality. He is also rather unhealthily obsessed with a continuation of bloodlines, and specifically his own, believing that a man’s only chance for immortality is through his children.

We the viewers gather all this pretty quickly because, well… boy, does he ever like to go on about it. It seems that if there’s one quality the intrepid film fan needs to cultivate to get through the Jose Marins filmography, it is an appreciation of the director/star’s penchant for ranting endlessly about whatever’s on his mind, proclaiming his views (or, more charitably, his character’s views) in bloodcurdling, fire & brimstone terms at every opportunity, shaking his fists at the skies and gesticulating like a deranged carnival barker as he does so. “What is blood?”, he demands of us in his opening monologue; “It is existence!” Uh… sure thing man. Personally, I find all this blather gets pretty tedious pretty quickly, but I do enjoy the exaggerated emphasis Marins puts on the Portuguese word for ‘hell’ (“EEEnfernooo!”), and waiting for it to pop up again usually keeps me awake through these outbursts.

Anyway, needless to say, it is these homespun philosophies of his that see Coffin Joe swiftly descending from the level of the merely odd to that of the aforementioned villainous monster. As the film opens, he is angry with his wife for her failure to bear him a son. And rather than just, say, giving it some time or considering fertility treatment (which I guess wouldn’t have made for much of a horror film), Joe decides instead to take more affirmative action and kill her – which he deems no great loss, because hey, his best friend Antonio’s fiancée looks like a bit of a goer, and might make a more suitable vessel for the hallowed Ze Do Caixao seed. Which obviously means he's going to have to kill Antonio too, and... well, you see where this is going.

Throughout the film, Joe uses his doctrines of self-preservation and violent egotism as justification for the brisk series of murders, mutilations and sexual assaults that this line of thinking sets him off on, and it is this crime spree, followed by the supernatural retribution he suffers after being cursed by a gypsy fortune-teller, that comprises the rest of the film’s narrative.

Visually, “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” is superbly realised, taking its inspiration less from the kind of formal gothic horror that was in the ascendant in Europe and North America at the time, and more from the most garish and theatrical end of the old Universal movies. I was particularly reminded of Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolfman as Coffin Joe stalked through fog-shrouded graveyards and treacherous forests, all obviously created to order on a ten foot wide set with a black backdrop and plenty of dry ice. These fake exteriors, along with the cramped and furniture-stuffed interior sets, help to give every shot in the movie a convincingly claustrophobic atmosphere. If not as overtly dreamlike or surreal as later Marins films, Coffin Joe still seems to spend "At Midnight.." trapped in a constrictive, funereal world of his own making, just as surely as the viewer in turn feels trapped within the crypt-like corridors of Marins' brain.


Although tame compared to the insane excess of his later work, this aesthetic set up gives Marins plenty of opportunity to indulge his trademark love of hair-raising and genuinely nightmarish imagery, with a few shocking incidents of graphic violence, and many moments in which deathless horror clichés – tarantulas, skulls, open graves, cackling hags etc. – are rendered with such ghoulish intensity that they become jarring and uncomfortable, as if we were seeing such things on screen for the first time. The film’s opening, with the aforementioned gypsy fortuneteller addressing the audience directly, warning them not to watch the movie if they “fear the wandering ghosts”, is a classic spookshow spine-tingler, worth the entry price alone, and the primitive ‘in-camera’ visual effects at the film’s climax are a joy – far weirder and more viscerally satisfying than more sophisticated techniques could ever have been.

What I found most unique about “Midnight..” though is the way that Marins – working entirely outside of any national film industry or pre-existing cinema tradition – manages to turn many of the conventions of the North American horror film upside down, reinventing the genre for a rural, working class, Catholic audience in Brazil, and apparently succeeding sufficiently well for them to welcome his film with open arms.

Seeing the image of Coffin Joe on a poster or video cover, most horror fans (or indeed innocent bystanders) would assume that he is going to be the supernatural antagonist in the film, in the tradition of Dracula, The Wolfman, Freddy Kruger or just about any other iconic monster. It is a surprise therefore to find that Joe is in fact a regular mortal and a staunch materialist to boot, and that his monstrous deeds arise purely from his own amoral and self-centered approach to life. And conversely, the supernatural in the world of the film, rather than being something frightening and strange, is presented as the benevolent belief system of the everyday people whom Joe terrorizes, closely aligned with the comfort and benign justice provided by the Catholic church.

In a North American horror story I suspect, the film’s memorable title would be something Coffin Joe himself might say, as he sets upon his victims with occult powers that seem an affront to their rational/scientific mindset. In Marins’ film however, the title is something that the gypsy fortuneteller – who in effect acts as the film’s moral compass – says TO Joe; a curse that brings the vengeance of the supernatural down upon him, to punish him for both his evil deeds and his lack of belief.


About the closest parallel to this I can come up with is the old fashioned use of literalist Christianity to fight evil in Hammer films (and not just the vampire and witchcraft ones either - “they charged me with assaulting a police officer… and acting against God”, Peter Cushing complains in ‘The Evil of Frankenstein’). But even Hammer always faced off ‘good’ supernatural forces (Christianity) against ‘bad’ (demons, monsters) – a recognisable idea to the Protestant/Western mindset, if an absurdly anachronistic one. It’s hard to think of another horror film from any country in which religion and the weirder forces of the occult are actually on the same side, helping to maintain the natural order by destroying a monster created by antisocial extremes of rational thinking.

But that is the situation which is made explicitly clear in “At Midnight..”, when Coffin Joe receives his comeuppance not only from the reanimated spirits of his victims (the “wandering ghosts”), but from also from a spectral parade of saints marching through the graveyard in a solemn funeral for Joe’s soon-to-be-departed spirit, and from a shining vision of a cross on a tomb wall, from which he recoils. Apparently Marins himself was once a steadfast Catholic, but it appears he underwent a crisis of faith shortly before he started making films. In the aforementioned documentary, he talks about arguing with priests, resenting their corruption and never going to church again. Clearly this loss of faith was still pretty fresh in his mind when he set about making “At Midnight..”, and both Coffin Joe’s somewhat subversive diatribes against religious belief, and the frenzied guilt trip of his supernatural fate, must have made for electrifying viewing for a Catholic audience.

Also unusual is the fact that Coffin Joe is the film’s protagonist. In conventional horror films where the villain is also central character, he will usually be a tragic, misguided figure with sympathetic qualities that help drive audience recognition (think again of The Wolfman, or of Vincent Price’s doomed aristocrats in all those Poe movies). When a villain is a TOTAL villain (the Dracula model), he is usually used as a shadowy threat, whilst other, more human, characters compete for our affections. Not so in “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” and its sequels – Coffin Joe is a miserable, misanthropic bastard with no redeeming features whatsoever, and yet he’s centre-screen throughout.

More than anything, this probably has to do with Jose Marins being a somewhat obsessive egotist who clearly felt that his performance and sound of his own voice were the central qualities of his film, to say nothing of the fact that he pretty much made the damn thing on his own with little in the way of a supportive cast or crew. And indeed, the film’s narrative suffers a great deal from this lack of anyone to identify with. The other characters are portrayed as little more than gormless cut-outs, and there’s only so long you can spend watching a hateful asshole going about his business before things start to get pretty tiresome, especially when he’s in the habit of pausing the action on a regular basis to lecture us on the finer points of his belief system.

Such flaws though are an integral part of the weird idiosyncrasies that make up Marins’ filmmaking, and to lose them would be to lose the intense imagery and visceral power that make “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” so unique - probably one of the best and most fascinating independent horror films made anywhere in the world in the early ‘60s.