À minuit, je possèderai ton âme

I love the idea of Coffin Joe ("Joseph The Grave"). I love his output. I love that he has channeled his obsessions into movies about deranged, obsessive characters. I can only admire and respect him.

I don't care that his movies are cheap. I don't care that they are slightly inept at times. Ed Wood's movies were cheap and inept, but they were also filled with passion and a neatly formed world view.

They are also rich in texture, designed with love and passion, self-contained and mostly set-bound like early Universal and PRC horror films (STRANGLER IN THE SWAMP, for example).

Jose Majica Marens is a true original and his movies are like nothing else you have ever seen. He enjoys hurling blasphemy at the Catholic church, he likes beating up hypocrites and his Coffin Joe indulges in random violence, rape, scaring women with spiders and general debauchery.

AT MIDNIGHT I'LL TAKE YOUR SOUL has a single-mindedness about it that makes it lovable. Joe wants only one thing -- to find a woman who will bear him a son. Since he's a brutal, loud, angry man, women aren't returning his calls, so he's frustrated. This frustration fuels virtually all of his movies.

Meeting Coffin Joe for the first time can be either a confusing, bewildering experience or the start of a beautiful relationship. It was the latter for me.

It's very impressive and ambitious for Jose Mojica Marins to get this project done when he had only 15 cans of negative film stock to start with, 2 of which got stolen leaving him only 13, and not having a main actor so having to play the part himself. Most of locations were indoor sets, except for one outdoor location. Although it may seem like the lack of planning and abrupt decisions could have affected the outcome, it in fact did not. This film has some great work, starting from Jose's performance with his monologues and single take unedited continuous scenes, all the way through the very impressive set and production design and special effects. They actually manually glued glitter on the negative to get that cheap effect of halo around the spirits. I always give credit to people who are willing to get things done no matter what the budget or circumstances. Several hair raising moments make me think that this film must have been really scary for it's time 40 years ago. Overall, this is a brilliant film that is very cinematic and relies on traditional but very effective tricks of the trade to make it work.

Almost like a "the seventh seal" for horror films.

***MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS***(Mild)

I saw "Coffin Joe: At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul" last Friday (1/12/07) on IFC's new "Grindhouse". I have to say that I laughed my ass off through the whole picture. Notbecause it was dumb or not an authentic horror film, I'm sure is was quite frightening in 1964 and probably the first horror film made in Brazil. What was so amusing to me was the character of Coffin Joe,known to the townspeople as "Ze do Caixao". Director, writer and star Jose Mojica Marins created one of the most memorable characters that I've ever seen in horror films, or any films for that matter. At the beginning of the film, we are warned by a gypsy fortune teller to leave the theater if you are not sure of your courage, after 2 minutes she says "too late! it's midnight! stay if you think you are brave!" The story opens on a Friday night when the Catholic tradition is to abstain from meat, I believe that Brazil is almost exclusively Catholic. So, Coffin Joe being an atheist, sits at his window eating a leg of lamb and laughing as he watches the Catholic precession go by, SO EVIL! Later at the local tavern he forces a local to eat from another leg of lamb. Soon his sins become much larger and murder is just one of them. I loved the camera work, especially the close ups of Joe's eyes with one eyebrow raised. Joe is the town's undertaker, funeral director, and gravedigger all in one, and dresses in a black suit with a cape and a top-hat. Joe/Jose's long curled fingernails (real), complete the picture! I recommend this film to anyone who loves camp or open to the bizarre!

This is my first forray into the wonderful world of Coffin Joe, and having read about Marins and his films was still not enough to prepare me. Not because "At Midnight..." is a great film by any set of conventional standards; it's a low-budget affair and it looks like it. What really makes it compelling is how passionate it is in all its blackly surreal glory.

Coffin Joe (Ze Do Caixao) is the atheist, unscrupulous undertaker of a small, religious community somewhere in Brazil. This set-bound place is more of a (at times too) convenient playground for Marins to explore his dark fantasies than any sort of realistic community. Its inhabitants are mere props to be abused, scoffed and laughed at. A sizeable guy who dares to stand up to him gets whipped in the face. His sole preoccupation is to find a woman worthy to bear him a son and thus "continue his bloodline". Coffin Joe strides through this fictional (and perhaps symbolic in Marin's mind) world, mocking the superstitious villagers, defying god, Satan and the dead, sometimes all of them together in a matter of minutes.

If "At Midnight..." is set apart from every other horror movie of its time, it's because the morbid, macabre imagery (skulls, plastic bats, cobwebs, tarantulas; you know the drill) is undercut by a Nietzche-esquire atheism that bites. At times it's as if the whole movie serves as nothing more than Marins' soapbox, his way of venting against the conservative and religious. How much of what Coffin Joe declares in the film are meant to be serious is anyone's guess. However it's exactly the fact that it works so well on a camp level (like a blasphemous Ed Wood flick) that redeems the film from all heavy-handedness.

In that aspect, and as far as what one would expect from an early 60's horror movie, "At Midnight..." is both avant-garde in its own micro-budget, often crude but unashamedly enthusiastic way and surrealistic. Mandatory viewing for fans of cult movies and I hear the sequels are better which I'll have to see for myself.

I was scouring the local mass media a/v store when on a cart I saw a title that caught my eye. Shaped like a coffin was this box set sitting with one of his twins. Being a horror fan I couldn't help but be interested (It looked very similar to a Misfits box set some moons ago).The title of this set was simply "The Coffin Joe Trilogy". My mind raced back to all those years of Fangoria stockpiled in the back of my mind. I grabbed, I bought and I loved every minute of the set. The first film which ,according to the notes on the inside, is a phenomena in Brazil. The character Coffin Joe is the local cinema boogeyman (ala Fred Krueger)and yet again teaches us that the lack of a budget only stimulates creativity. 8/10