How badass is Zé do Caixão or as we know him, Coffin Joe?

Can you imagine the audacity to not just create this character but to become him in the midst of a country where more than 60% of the population is Catholic?

Can you even comprehend how upset people were when José Mojica Marins become the long-fingernail-wearing amoral undertaker driven to continue his bloodline by having a son with the perfect woman while murdering and ruining everyone in his wake? How did they deal with a boogeyman who filled their head with doubletalk and Nietzschian statements?

As Coffin Joe would yell, “I challenge your power! I deny your existence! Nothing exists, but life.”

The first appearance of Coffin Joe is in this movie, a film in which the evil undertaker searches for his perfect woman who will bear him the child that will make him immoral. After all, his wife is infertile, so he decides to murder her with a spider. And not just on any day. On a Catholic Holy Day. And then he decides to break another Commandment, coveting Terezinha, the fiancée of his friend Antonio.

Joe and Antonio visit a gypsy who foretells that a tragedy will keep Antonio and Terezinha from being married. This causes Joe to scream at the woman about how the supernatural is a lie, then he makes her warning come true by strangling his friend before drowning him. The very next day, he starts to court Terezinha by giving her a canary. When she resists his advances, he beats her and then assaults her. She curses him and reveals that she will kill herself — one of the gravest sins in the Catholic Church — and come back to pull him into Hell. He laughs, but the next day, she has hung herself.

The police just can’t seem to figure out why all this death is happening in this small village, but Dr. Rodolfo does. Coffin Joe responds by tearing out his eyes with his long fingernails and lighting him on fire. Problem solved. He remains unpunished and even starts to fall for another woman, Marta. On their date, he sees the gypsy who warns him that he will be punished. That night, as he walks home, the cemetery calls him, the place where all of his victims are burning. He opens the grave of Antonio and Terezinha and they begin to open their eyes as their mouths are filled with worms and insects. Coffin Joe begins to scream, as he is trapped between life and death, finally paying for his crimes as the church bells ring at midnight.

This is just the start of how strange these movies would become. If you liked the last ten minutes of this, just get ready. It gets really good from here.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe is something I’ve been waiting for and it does not let me down in the least. Each movie is packed with so many extras. At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul has commentary with José Mojica Marins, filmmaker Paulo Duarte and film scholar Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles, a new video essay by Lindsay Hallam, Damned: The Strange World of José Mojica Marins a documentary on Marins by André Barcinski and Ivan Finotti as well as Bloody Kingdom, Marins’ first short film with director’s commentary and excerpts from early works by Marins. You can get this set from MVD.