Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe

Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe
Blu-ray
Arrow Films
1964-1977
Starring José Mojica Marins
Written by José Mojica Marins
Photographed by Giorgio Attili,
Directed by José Mojica Marins

Anthony Shelton’s book on Portuguese folk art, Heaven, Hell and Somewhere In Between, portrays the people of that historically unstable country as struggling “with good and evil every day.” The title could describe the work of Brazil’s José Mojica Marins too—except this particular filmmaker had no trouble choosing between good and evil, at least on screen. Marins was a self-made man, and the man he made was named Coffin Joe, a philosophical gravedigger, neighborhood bully and perpetual outrage machine.

Born in San Paulo on a Friday the 13th in 1936, Marins lived above a movie house owned by his father and went to sleep each night with the sounds of the cinema echoing from below. The proximity to that theater most likely sparked his dream life as well; young Jose would dedicate his playtime to making home movies, not unlike fellow childhood auteur Steven Spielberg (any further comparisons end right there). As the boy got older, his obsessions came into focus; though Brazil had declared its independence from Portugal a century before, Coffin Joe would show them what real liberation looked like.

Marins ended up making over 40 movies but Coffin Joe’s persona was sealed in the first three of those films, 1964’s At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, 1967’s This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, and 1968’s The Strange World of Coffin Joe. Dressed in top hat and black cape, sporting fingernails grown into long curling claws, Joe fashioned himself as an aristocrat with a sadistic streak, the unofficial Marquis de San Paulo (he set 1971’s The End of Man inside an insane asylum, a salute to De Sade’s final reststop).

He was an abominable character with metaphysical pretensions, in many respects a grindhouse version of Stephen Rojack, the urbane libertine of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream who murdered his wife and sodomized the maid before escaping to the temples of Yucátan. Like Rojack, Coffin Joe is both the hero and villain of his own story.

In At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, Joe is the undertaker of San Paulo, a dusty, barren town that wouldn’t be out of place in a Wild Bill Elliot western. He’s a busy funeral director, mainly because he furnishes most of the corpses (shades of Jacques Tourneur’s The Comedy of Terrors). But Joe is no workaholic, most nights he can be found disrupting the town saloon with boorish behavior and nonchalant mayhem (during one encounter he chops off the fingers of a disrespectful barfly). This surly goon actually has a friend—Antonio is his name, a simple soul with a sultry wife named Terezinha, a seductive vixen who’s made Joe forget about his own wife, Lenita. Joe is a restless soul with a wandering eye and obsessed with “the continuity of blood.” This gravedigger is terrified of death and he’s looking for the perfect woman to produce the perfect child to extend his lineage. In this department, Lenita has fallen short.

So Joe does what comes naturally; he murders Lenita and Antonio and rapes Terezinha who kills herself rather than carry Joe’s baby. The film’s phantasmagorical finale—Joe is trapped in a mausoleum with a trio of vengeful spirits—allows the undead Terezinha to make good on her promise: “At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul.”

Joe is as unstoppable as those vindictive ghosts and he returned the following year in This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse.  Still searching for his dream girl, he sets up a harem staffed with potential child-bearers, a lethargic crew of lingerie models who are made to endure humiliating rituals to prove their fealty to Joe’s depraved philosophy (tarantulas and snakes are high on the list of torments). He finally separates one zaftig lass from the herd and declares her the perfect woman—though that relationship meets a speedy end when she’s forced to have sex while the other women are fed to snakes.

The film is unusual in that it reveals that Joe has a conscience of sorts; after a day’s work in the torture chamber, he dreams up a fire and brimstone nightmare that could have inspired a Ron Ormand film. It’s clearly a decisive moment for Marins as a filmmaker—a shift into art house cinema so inept that it has its own fascination: the black and white film flips to color and raises the curtain on a high school production of Faust. The walls of hell seem to be made of very flammable cardboard and the denizens of the netherworld are as lively as a museum exhibit. Joe wakes a changed man—it’s not exactly Christmas morning but the finale does feature a penitent Joe asking a priest for salvation (a scene demanded by the censors). But salvation for Joe would be bad for the box office so his next film showed no signs of redemption, in fact just the opposite.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe was a trio of short horror films which showed Marins in command of his own peculiar style—a mix of Doris Wishman’s comatose Mise-en-scène and Herschel Gordon Lewis’s glaringly fake gore effects. The film runs the gamut of bad taste from necrophilia to cannibalism and is as entertaining as an autopsy.

Marins wasn’t about to stop there, churning out one film after another – 1970’s Awakening of the Beast, a supposedly trippy horror take on the counterculture highlighted by LSD experiments and kinky sex, 1971’s The End of Man in which he played “Finis Hominis” a supernatural take on Eastwood’s Man with No Name, and 1978’s Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind. A culmination of sorts, the film’s threadbare plot is enhanced by a series of scenes from previous Marins films—it’s Coffin Joe’s version of That’s Entertainment and, well, you be the judge. In 1967 Joe finally settled into his dream job as a Brazilian Svengoolie, the horror host of a weekly program called Beyond, Much Beyond the Beyond. In 1996 Marins introduced a Shock Theater type program that specialized in older horror films. It was called Cine Trash.

As poor as Marin’s films are, they’re their own kind of folk art; primitive, powerful, and undeniably disturbing. And they have their own twisted integrity. Marin’s reign of terror merits a book—it could be called Trash, Art, and the Movies. But that title is already taken.

Arrow Films knows their trash and loves it. They’ve put ten of Marin’s signature films in one formidable box set, Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe. The transfers for these movies are beautiful even if the films are not and the extras add fascinating background on Marins and his work.

Chief among the extras is an illustrated collector’s book, Coffin Joe: Against the World!, featuring new writing by Tim Lucas, Carlos Primati, and others. There are archived audio commentaries with Marins, video essays and several special presentations including The Demonic Surrealism of Coffin Joe, a new interview with scholar and filmmaker Virginie Sélavy that explores the parallels between the work of Marins in relation to South American surrealist movements.

The complete rundown of extras can be found at Arrow’s site.