Original title: À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma
Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins) – better known as Coffin Joe in English-speaking countries – is an undertaker in a Brazilian country town. He’s also an inveterate bully half of the town is afraid of, sadistically violent, a misogynist of the highest order, an atheist and unbeliever in all things supernatural in a deeply religious and superstitious community, a man with his very own sartorial ideas, as well as someone given to long rants somewhere between Nietzsche, LaVey and John Wayne Gacy.
If he weren’t so murderously dangerous and brutal in his retribution of every slight he himself deliberately provokes, he’d probably already have been driven out of town or lynched. Right now, at least when he’s not violating someone somewhere, Zé is obsessed with the question of continuing his bloodline – given his philosophy, it’s the only way a man has towards immortality, or so he monologues. Since his live-in lover has not been able to get pregnant for years, Zé really is in need of a new breeding option – obviously, in his mind, the possibility he might not be able to have children because something’s biologically wrong with him doesn’t even come up. He already has another candidate for the position in mind, the virtuous Terezinha (Magda Mei). There’s a problem there, or rather three problems: firstly, Zé doesn’t truck with his old girlfriends running around potentially getting pregnant by other men (his logic, not mine), so he really needs to get rid of the old model woman rather more permanently. Secondly Terezinha is the fiancée of his friend – the film never explains how Zé managed to acquire one – the totally normal Antônio (Nivaldo Lima); thirdly, Terezinha really isn’t into Zé at all. Who could imagine why?
Of course, problems one and two can easily be solved with murder, while number three just needs a total disinterest in consent, so they aren’t all that difficult to solve for our protagonist.
The deeply uncooperative Terezinha decides to commit suicide after Zé rapes her, though, and from then on out, the unbelieving Zé is haunted by ghosts and portents that might very well end in supernatural vengeance.
Being a very poor country, Brazilian’s film industry in the early 60s was a small and struggling thing; being an at the best of times very conservative one, it lacked in horror movies completely. That is, until José Mojica Marins, who at this point had already made a small handful of films in other genres, came upon the brilliant idea on how to get horror through censorship, while also keeping it extremely critical of large parts of the country’s culture: just put all of your criticism, and all of your ideas into the mouth of the most outrageously exalted villain you can come up with.
As an added bonus, this also provided Marins with the opportunity to get as much exploitational value into his film as possible. The violence and the blasphemy and the sex are, after all, the misdeeds of a villain who will be rightfully punished by supernatural forces (though, one can’t help but notice, not the power of Christ), so this is not a way to criticize the way things are and get behinds in seats by being as outrageous as possible, but really a tale told to keep people honest citizens, Mister Censor. Censors being censors, they did apparently buy this argument, and Marins was off to the races, producing a series of increasingly psychedelic and bizarre movies featuring versions of the Zé do Caixão figure, always embodied by Marins himself with the glee of a guy who is getting away with it.
Marins’s portrayal of Zé here truly is a sight to behold. His improbable get-up and style, his long, soul(?)ful rants about often utterly horrible ideas, his mean-spiritedness and his love for often surprisingly gory violence are what holds the film together instead of a more traditional narrative. Marin’s direction and Giorgio Attili’s photography are a little rough around the edges, but they have such a sense for the dramatic, and the macabre money shot technical polish is replaced by the sheer energy of what they are doing. This is the how it looks when a group of people do something new, and exciting, and can even allow themselves jokes like Zé using the crown of thorns of a Jesus statuette to beat a guy up without getting dragged to court for it.
There isn’t only joy in the breaking of taboos on display here, though. The climax in which Zé is dispatched by ghosts looks very much schooled on the way classic kaidan cinema would have realized the same sort of ending – just with a bit more ickiness here – and there are rather a lot of little visual flourishes that suggest a filmmaker who is rather well-informed about what is going on in the rest of the world, incorporating what fits into his aesthetics and discarding the rest.
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