Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins),known as Coffin Joe to the Anglo-speaking world, is the top hap-hatted, amoral ghouljust as famous asFreddy KruegerorJason Vorhees— but you’ve probably never heard of him.Hailing from Brazil,the underrated international horror movie iconwas established in what is called the"Coffin Joe Trilogy,“consisting ofAt Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul(1963),This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse(1967), andEmbodiment of Evil(2008), but has since appeared in nine more films, three television series, songs, music videos, and comic books. The first film establishes Joe as an undertaker with Nietzschian beliefs on a quest to conceive a child with “the perfect woman.” This is also the plot of each subsequent film. To do this, Joe often resorts to kidnapping, murder and rape. His actions damn him to hell and, although he does not believe in the supernatural, he usually finds himself dealing with ghosts, the personified version of Death, and paranoid visions of Hell.
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul
Brazil’s first horror film, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, centers on the sadistic undertaker Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe), who terrorizes a small town. Obsessed with finding the perfect woman to bear his child, Zé’s reign of terror leads to supernatural retribution as he defies religious and moral boundaries.
Who Is Coffin Joe?
Coffin Joe is a murderous undertaker, an anti-moralist obsessed with the idea of genetic superiority. Joe is profoundly anti-Catholic, as is best illustrated in the first moments of his inaugural film.Catholics, who traditionally do not eat meat on Fridays, are met with Joe’s ire as he indulges in beef and lamb while castigating his Catholic and barren live-in girlfriend and servant Lenita (Valéria Vasquez). He believes that the only thing that matters in life is the “continuity of blood,” the production of male children who will preserve his bloodline and, in doing so, subvert the finality of death.Thus, he is uncharacteristically good to children, believing them to be the only pure creatures.
InAt Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, he stops a father from beating a child in the street. InThis Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse,he saves a child from being run over by an out-of-control motorcyclist. This stands in stark juxtaposition to his cruel and sadistic nature and his disgusting attitudes toward women as beings whose value is entirely determined by their fertility. Thus, he murders Lenita, who is unable to conceive, by tying her up and letting a spider bite her to death as he delights in her suffering.
Freddy Krueger’s Got Nothing On This Underrated Horror Gem That Weaponizes Dreams
This psychological horror seamlessly blends real-world traumas with dream-based terrors.
Coffin Joe is altogether ghoulish, a creepy murderous ideologue with excessively long fingernails in thevein of Nosferatu, which he uses to great effect to horrifically gouge out his eyeballs when confronted with the horror of his crimes.Joe is a revolt against Catholic morality, a character opposed to Christendomwhose unwavering belief in his superiority drives him to commit unspeakable acts that carry on through each film in a timeless and seemingly unending quest to bend femininity to his will. Despite his wanton cruelty and heinous crimes, Joe manages to escape worldly justice by staying one step ahead of the police and killing anyone who can attest to his crimes but often finds himself tortured by terrifying hallucinations promising him eternal damnation.
‘At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul’ Is Brazil’s First Horror Movie
In 1964, Coffin Joe and his depraved morality terrified audiences inBrazil’s first-ever horror film,At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul.During the first few minutes of the film, Joe is introduced to the audience where he exposes his morality to the camera. He is ominous in his black top hat and cape, looking like a vampire with his long nails. His morality, or lack thereof, is essential to his character, as it is the force that drives Joe to ply his evil trade. Joe’s profoundly anti-Catholic stance is essential to what makes him particularly fiendish, as Brazil is a predominantly devout Catholic country and audiences would understandably find him both shocking and devilishly repulsive.
Joe desires to have a childwith Terezinha (Magda Mei), believing her to be the only woman worthy of bearing his child, but she is betrothed to Joe’s best friend, Antônio (Nivaldo Lima). Joe finds himself at odds with Antônio. Disgusted by his religiosity and his feelings of love for Terezinha, he bludgeons and then drowns his friend in a bathtub to get him out of the way. Joe wholeheartedly believes this might make things right and, because he is stronger than Antônio, only he deserves Terezinha. With Antônio out of the way, Terezinha is helpless andJoe rapes her in a disgusting attempt at impregnating her. Joe drags his fingernails over her flesh and then beats her, delighting in her blood and proclaiming that horrible scene is exactly how he likes it.What makes Joe so particularly awful is that he believes his actions are justified by his belief system and that not only are his actions not wrong, but they are good and in keeping with the natural order.
Coffin Joe Returned in ‘This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse’
Coffin Joe returned two years later in the sequelThis Night I’ll Possess Your Corpsein a direct continuation of the events of the first film. Much likeEvil DeadII, the film’s sequel is essentially a retelling of the first story, but Joe’s motivation is better established.Joe is haunted by a latent guilt, a hangover from his Catholic upbringing that terrorizes him with visions of ghosties and ghouls of all kinds. At the end of the first film, Joe has clawed out his eyes but is rescued by doctors who nurse him back to health.He stands trial for his crimesbut without the sufficient evidence needed to land a conviction, the courts let him back into the world.
Emboldened by this, Joe kidnaps six women and subjects them to experiments in order to determine which one should bear his child. He kills all but one, a woman who loves him for a reason that is not adequately explained, but she nonetheless wants his baby. However, upon finding out that he killed a pregnant woman, Joe is wracked with guilt and tormented by a technicolor dream of hell. The scene itself is pretty incredible, switching from black and white to a vivid sequence full of lush visuals steeped in the tormented wails of the damned.
The most terrifying part of this film,aside from its wild depiction of hell, is that any woman at all would ascribe to Joe’s system of belief. Each subsequent iteration of the character follows this pattern of murder and rape in the service of a superior race, in what is a bad reading of Nietzschian philosophy and something better ascribed to Nazism. His inner repulsivity is greatly enhanced by his ghoulish appearance, and while the sequel is more or less a reworking of the first film, it makes sense why he has become a Brazilian horror icon.Coffin Joe stands against everything good and decent, he is the shadow essence of humanity and attractive in a way that Dracula is, a dark evil that persists as long as he lives.
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soulis available to rent on Apple TV.
