À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma: Where Are You, Satan?

If you study or follow  horror film (or genre film, or cult film) long enough, certain names start to crop up. My own education in horror films is surprisingly spotty for as much as a I write about them, and I’m always running across films I feel like I need to watch or directors to whom I need to pay attention, from a historical standpoint if nothing else. Last week, horror film lost one such director in José Mojica Marins, from São Paulo, Brazil. He was probably best known for his series of cult-films featuring a character called Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe). Until now, I’d only seen one of them - A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres (The Strange Hostel Of Naked Pleasures) - and it was a prime slice of mid-70s psychedelic weirdness. He made and/or starred in enough films as Coffin Joe to make him a pop-culture icon in Brazil on the level of Freddy Krueger. Now, I’m not much of a fan of Freddy Krueger, but like I said, what I saw was definitely the product of a singular vision, and for as long as I’ve been saying “I should check out more of those films one day,” Marins’ death reminds me that there’s no time like the present, and no place like the beginning.

This, then, is what led me to sit down and watch the first Coffin Joe film, À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma (At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul), and though it’s arguably tame by modern standards, it’s also not as tame as it could be. The film it probably reminds me of the most is Blood Feast, and though it’s certainly not as balls-out weird as that film (few things are), it does have a similar fever-dream vibe, the product of melodramatic acting, cultural distance and simultaneously cheap and surprisingly graphic effects that also give this film the feeling of something that you might find yourself watching in a nightmare.

It begins with two monologues to the camera. First, Coffin Joe rants about how life is the beginning of death, and death is the end of life, and how all that matters is blood. Then, an old fortune-teller type tells us that we shouldn’t watch this film if we don’t have the heart, because this is a tale of vengeance and we risk our soul in the process - it’s real Tales From The Crypt stuff, but without the cheeky humor.

And thus we are introduced to Coffin Joe. He is the undertaker for a small Brazilian town, and he’s sort of a mix of Mr. Hyde (no Dr. Jekyll here) and the town bully from an old Western. He gleefully flaunts all custom and taboo (shortly after we are introduced to him, he’s sitting in his house, watching a religious  procession walk by, gleefully eating lamb off the bone on a meatless Friday), and he’s obsessed with continuing his bloodline. His wife cannot bear children at all, let alone the son he demands, and so he becomes obsessed with young, lovely - and most importantly, fertile -Terezinha, certain that she should be the mother of his child.  Oh, sure, she’s engaged to Antonio, but he gets what he wants, and has no qualms about taking, well, anything. Or anyone.

What follows is a pretty crudely assembled film, more a series of vignettes than anything else, demonstrating the lengths to which Coffin Joe will go, the destruction he leaves in his wake, and the price he pays for doing so. He is a prototypically Satanic figure - he doesn’t believe in God, or the Devil, or spirits. He believes only in power, and wields it to sate his appetites in many forms. He forces himself on women, beats men and women alike for defying him, and he routinely bribes the townspeople to look the other way at his excesses. The majority of the film is basically just him on a tear, first murdering his wife, then raping Terezinha, then murdering anyone who is about to discover his treachery. Which, in a town as small as this one and him as visible a public figure as he is, doesn’t feel like an especially sustainable course of action, but Coffin Joe revels in his power, utterly defiant in the face of morals, laws, and gods. None hold any power for him, and there’s something a little bracing about how few fucks he really has to give. No apologies, no justifications, just raw appetite.

But this is still basically a morality tale, as so many horror films are - the old fortune-teller from the prologue, who is the town’s bruxa. confronts Coffin Joe and tells him that for his sins, he will at midnight be visited by the ghosts of everyone he’s wronged, and they will have their revenge. And sure enough, the witch’s prophecies come true and Coffin Joe’s rampage through a graveyard turns into a waking nightmare in what is actually a fairly effective sequence, given the limited budget and technical constraints of the time. The film is shot in black and white, very much on the cheap, but what it lacks in technical sophistication it makes up for in gonzo energy. The violence Coffin Joe enacts on the townspeople isn’t downplayed in the ways we’d normally expect from films made in the mid-60s - he beats Terezinha badly and then makes a point of kissing her battered face, relishing the taste of blood, and he disfigures someone who stands up to him by mashing the crown of thorns from a statue of Jesus into his face. It’s a film that makes us watch the suffering he inflicts. His final reckoning is a gauntlet of hanging bodies, their eyes bulging, corpses with maggots squirming in their faces, spiders crawling out of eyesockets, seriously gruesome stuff. Coffin Joe is wild-eyed and totally sure of his dominance right up to the very end, but it does him no good, as the dead get their justice and he is damned. I've got a few other films about Coffin Joe, and I'm curious to see where they go from here.

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