



A man in black terrorizes villagers while searching for the perfect woman to continue his bloodline. For this atheist, offspring, above all else, is sacred. This is Zé do Caixão, better known as Coffin Joe. In At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964), This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967), and Embodiment of Evil (2008)—the so-called “Coffin Joe trilogy”—he’s an undertaker that cuts a striking figure. He wears a black cape and black suit. A black top hat sits on his black wavy hair. His black beard is thick and kinky. His protuberant lips tremble and one eyebrow arches when something delights him, such as a violent death. A pair of leather gloves hide grown out Nosferatu nails. Appearing as if out of thin air, he’s a deadly dandy with little patience for the dead, and none for the living. The Coffin Joe trilogy is the missing link between the Universal monster movies and the Italian gothic films of Mario Bava, Riccardo Freda, and company.

Coffin Joe is a showman, hellbent on seducing you. Just look at the prologue, which recalls the one in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), that opens At Midnight: his wide eyes bore a hole into the camera as he proclaims his nihilist worldview. “What is life? It is the beginning of death. What is death? It is the end of life. What is existence? It is the continuity of blood. What is blood? It is the reason to exist!” He says to the camera as it pushes ever closer to his face, as if mesmerized by his question-and-answer rhetoric. Coffin Joe is a mix of P.T. Barnum and Count Dracula—a huckster and an elegant ghoul.

Coffin Joe is José Mojica Marins’ bastard child. For six decades, Marins has donned cape and top hat to become Coffin Joe. Marins was born, fittingly, on a Friday the 13—March 13, 1936. His parents were Spanish immigrants who migrated to Saõ Paulo, Brazil. They were circus performers before managing a movie theater in the city. During this time, young Marins sneaked into the projection booth, watched moving images, and became transfixed by them. He saw horror movies that his parents didn’t want him to see. At the precocious age of 8, he got his first camera. He made his first feature, Adventurer’s Fate (1958), when he was 22. At 28, Marins made his first Coffin Joe film, At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul. Reminiscent of how the idea of 3 Women (1977) came to Robert Altman in a dream, Coffin Joe came to Marins in a nightmare. On October 11, 1963, Marins dreamt that a man in black wanted to show him his birth and death date, but he refused. From this fantastical origin story Coffin Joe was born.

Midnight, like the following entries in the trilogy, is a ramshackle film that smashes one event into another. It’s grimy and gritty, filthy and squalid, befitting the nihilism Coffin Joe extols. A menace to a village, he whips the religious people into fear. In one scene, blasphemously, he eats a leg of lamb in front of a procession of believers on Good Friday. Coffin Joe puts his extravagant, sinful life on display for the devout. “If I can do it, you can do it to,” his actions seem to say. It’s a brash moment—in a film full of them—that both attracted the attention of censors and adventurous viewers. A hash of deaths follows that rivals anything Herschell Gordon Lewis shot at the time. Whippings, beatings, eye gouging, poisonous spider bites, drowning, rape—Coffin Joe does it all for the sake of finding the woman to sire Coffin Joe Jr. His eyebrow arches many times.

As midnight nears, Coffin Joe’s hubris gets the best of him. Wandering in a cemetery, he taunts and tempts the spirits of people he extinguished. Standing on top of a tombstone shaped into a cross, he dares the spirits to take him straight to hell. Since there’s no response, he concludes that they don’t exist, and Coffin Joe goes on his merry way, beating and murdering people who prevent him from finding a mate. Yet near the end of the film, the spirits do respond, plaguing Coffin Joe, who crawls through muck and mire, over graves and in catacombs until he’s struck dead by…spirits? He opens the coffins of two of his victims and shrieks at the rotten, maggot-strewn corpses. A cut, and the next thing you know, he’s lying on his backside, his eyeballs bulging out of their sockets.

Coffin Joe isn’t dead after all. This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse begins with the townsfolk finding him. Over the title sequence, he’s nursed back to health, absolved of his crimes in a court of law, and released into the world once more to find his perfect woman. However, this time a disfigured, hunchbacked henchman, Bruno (Jose Lobo), aids him—the Igor to Coffin Joe’s Frankenstein. This Night is more chaotic and swift than At Midnight. Editor Luis Elias (who worked with Marins on At Midnight) cuts immediately after a scene’s action ends, creating a breakneck rhythm that is unlike the first film. It’s as if the film shared some of the amphetamines Marins took to make these early films.

Coffin Joe is more fulminating, more dogmatic in diatribes about a kind of Übermensch, immortality, and atheism. In This Night, there’s just more, and it’s pushed to the extreme. Take a sequence that visualizes the threat Coffin Joe got in At Midnight and the nightmare Marins had as a boy: a figure in black drags Coffin Joe out of bed and into a cemetery where hands emerge from individual graves. One pair pulls Joe headfirst into hell. Black-and-white changes to color. And what color! The film took a hit of Kenneth Anger. Blood oozes out of walls in which arms, legs, and heads stick out of. Fire, steam, and brimstone add texture. It’s a sequence that plays like Jean Cocteau caught in the grip of delirium.

41 years later, Marins made the final entry in his trilogy, Embodiment of Evil. It’s as brutal and spasmodic as ever. You know the story by now: Dogged Coffin Joe will do anything and everything to find a woman fit to carry his child. What has changed is Coffin Joe. He’s bald, thicker in waist and face, and his beard is white and scruffy. Coffin Joe is now a creepy-crawly grandfather.

He may be old, but he’s still virile and violent. His methods of torture are more inventive in his senior years. I don’t think I’ll forget anytime soon a scene featuring a naked woman, melted cheese, and a rat. Once Coffin Joe finds a potential mate, he mates with her. In an unhinged scene, blood rains down on them, gushing even, so that a pool forms and envelops them. The film transports to a “Zulawskienne” setting in a dessert where people are being crucified and cannibalized. Joe looks on with an elder gent wearing a coat made of hair, and who may or may not be Satan. End scene. The ancient Coffin Joe is in a modern Saõ Paulo, color-graded to a rancid yellow. He’s back to spill and transmit blood. When roused to the breaking point, just before exploding with violence, Marins will use an insert that has been a running visual motif throughout his films. He’ll cut to a close-up of Coffin Joe’s eyes. Through the glories of editing, they become bloodshot. Coffin Joe is out for blood, ready for blood, blood of my blood. The lineage is sacred.

by Tanner Tafelski