Not your average Joe
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul opens with a strange-looking man in a top-hat delivering a sermon to the camera: Zé do Caixão, whom we know in English as Coffin Joe (José Mojica Marins). He rants about life and death and meaningless like he just took a college course on Nietzsche, but strikes an immediately unforgettable figure. And then the movie gives us a series of familiar spooky images: skulls, candelabras, and cackling witches. It’s contrasting visions of horror in just a few minutes: the movie is both kooky-spooky and dead serious about its boogeyman, a small-town undertaker with bad eyebrows, worse fingernails, and a great top hat. Within the tension of those two openings lies the enigma of Coffin Joe: Like a proper libertine showman, the question of how much Marins means anything Joe says and does always hangs in the air.
At least, that’s the effect of this first iteration of Coffin Joe. After the unexpected success of this 1964 microbudget, self-produced horror film, the character would become a Brazilian horror icon inextricably linked to Marins himself, the edges blurred between the transgressive character and the batty creator. Marins featured the character in a long string of episodic exploitation sideshows across several decades, most of which I have not seen but are reviewed in friend-of-the-site Gavin McDowell’s outstanding column about Coffin Joe over at Alternate Ending.
I find the appeal of Coffin Joe in his debut film to be in the tension between showy edgelord and aching soul. In a hyper-devout Brazilian culture, where Catholic guilt and religiosity dominate society and attempt to suppress the darkness and weirdness of its denizens, Joe pushes the boundaries of good taste and blind faith. Coffin Joe, a dark mirror of Marins’ own impulses, is performance art, a piece of showmanship but also deep rebellion. In the film’s opening scenes, we learn that Coffin Joe is a rule breaker because he dares to eat meat on Fridays. Darker sins would follow, but this opening transgression sets the tone of a freak raging against the holy machine.
Coffin Joe does not believe in eternal life in the arms of a Savior, but he still desires immortality, and he sees the possibility of undying glory through passing along his own genes: Joe wants an heir to his self-ordained Übermensch bloodline. His wife Lenita (Valeria Vasuez) is infertile. She can’t give him a son, so he decides she is disposable, dispatching her in an implausible, goofy spider-assisted murder. Then he sets his sights on the town’s “purest” woman, Terezinha (Magda Mei), the perfect Marian vessel of his own holy progeny. Unfortunately for Coffin Joe, she is engaged to his friend, Antonio (Nivaldo Lima). Thus comes another murder, and when Terezinha resists Joe, he commits a barely off-screen rape, and the story only grows darker from there, with suicides and eye mutilation in the mix. The town’s authorities consist mostly of one very gullible doctor, Rodolfo (Ilidio Martins Simoes), and a population willing to pretend the devilish man in the cape might be innocent of all the violence that happens to occur to people in his vicinity. He’s a trusted community member of minor authority, after all.
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, the first Brazilian horror film, is a groundbreaking oddity, but also part of a transitional wave of horror that modernized the genre. Marins made the film in 1964, so post-Psycho, but pre-Night of the Living Dead, and it shares a bracing energy with both of those films, though it’s nowhere near as engaging in story or mood as either. Like Romero especially, Marins charges the film with angry satire. Coffin Joe is so heightened as a contrast to his community’s cultural repression that he’s even more outlandish and objectionable than the thing he’s rebelling against, lending a strange ambivalence to the film. We sense that the undertaker doth protest too much when it comes to his atheism: The guy who insists there’s no supernatural savior still flinches at a fortune teller’s premonitions. He rants about “existência!” and demands proof of the divine, but a couple scene later sprints in fear from shimmering hallucinations that may in fact be the ghosts of his own victims. In the film’s final scenes, Joe’s crumbling sanity is a cosmic irony: whether God is real and righteously bringing vengeance to the sacrilegious Joe, or God is a myth and Joe simply drives himself mad with his exaggerated atheism and amorality, it ultimately does not matter, because the concept of “God” defeats Joe either way. (And Coffin Joe is a horror villain, so we can assume any death will hold only until the budget for a sequel comes together.)
It’s difficult to describe Coffin Joe without seeing him in action. He is uniquely off-putting but strangely real, not like a Universal horror monster. He’s a bit like if the grimy killers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were actually functioning but awkward members of society. His on-screen presence is also a cousin to Tommy Wiseau’s: vaguely non-human but in a way you can’t entirely hate. Whenever he’s around “normal” people, your eye goes straight to the guy who dressed for Halloween in July. Every instinct tells you to steer clear.
Marins clearly had no idea how to make a movie, and his total absence of budget does him no favors, but he has undeniable juice. This film reminds me of the original Mad Max in that sense — very little in the way of imagery or compelling craft, but so full of confidence and energy you can’t help but be won over by its creator’s vision. That it developed a following is not a surprise. It helps that Marins has a bit of a carnival barker in him: The posters and titles sell you a raving funhouse (“At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul” is an all-timer), though the actual film, at least in this first outing, is a bit more lean and acerbic than Coffin Joe’s breezy-sleazy midnight screening fun suggests.
The acting is inconsistent, and the audio is quite uneven, but the craft has a few bootstrapped moments that shine, especially in the mood and odd sense of place: Also like Mad Max, this film gives us a glimpse of rural and bygone era in a real-life tiny Brazilian village. Marins renders it alternately podunk and charged with a dark spirit. The cemetery gauntlet in the last reel is a mini-masterclass in low-budget dread, easily Marins’ biggest visual achievement here: wind, shadows, mock-processions of mourners carrying Joe’s own coffin, and the movie’s most harrowing image, bug-eyed corpses, stare directly through the camera into our souls (right at midnight). Marins’ use of violence and nudity is mercifully less explicit than the director would later lean on, but the film still overflows with low-rent nastiness, especially whenever women are on the receiving end. The movie knows that sacrilege shocks; it’s a bit less self-critical about misogyny.
So what merit does this historical oddity offer, finally? A nation’s first modern horror feature, a proto-slasher built from the warped perspective of the killer, a gleeful poke at Catholic mores of a conservative culture, and a character study of a broken, evil man filled with contradictions. Joe styles himself beyond fear and beyond good and evil, so divine he must partake in natural Darwinian biological processes. The movie’s punchline is that Coffin Joe is just another mortal who can’t outrun his sins or the clock striking twelve. Even when it’s cheap or incoherent, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul is something special. Joe would lean more into his video nasty tendencies in later movies, but this is the one that plants the top hat on the map, and it’s an uneven but provocative screed.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.