It is with a heavy heart I report the passing of 83-year-old Brazilian underground filmmaker and horror legend- Jose Mojica Marins, aka “Coffin Joe.” Usually dressed in a top hat and black cape with outrageously long fingernails, he made a series of notorious films from the 1960s until his death that were real nightmare fuel, filled with lots of blasphemous swipes at the Catholic Church and horrifying images of torture and murder. He was the “Freddy Krueger” of Brazil until his films suddenly got so demented they were banned by the government. But he never stopped making movies.
Marins was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil on March 15, 1929. His father Antonio, worked in a traveling circus as a bullfighter and went on to manage a local movie theater, where the young Jose became fascinated with the horror films shown there. His father gave him an 8mm camera, and Marins started making his own movies using neighborhood children and experimenting with trick photography. At 12 he got hold of a 16mm camera and shot 17 movies in three years, mostly melodramas, mysteries and forays into the supernatural. Two incidents occurred in his youth that distinctly altered Marins’ life. At a funeral he attended, the corpse rose out of the coffin (the man had catalepsy), and everyone ran from the church in horror. Everyone, that is, except Marins and a few of his friends. The incident haunted him. Later, while he was walking through a cemetery with a friend one night, ghostly shapes rose up from the graves and badly frightened him (a phenomenon known as “will-o’-the-wisp”). A nightmare in which Marins saw himself being dragged into an open grave by a man dressed in black triggered the creation of “Ze do Caixao” (pronounced ZEH-dough-kySHAWN), which literally translates to “Joe the Grave” (Coffin Joe on video).
Marins later featured this villainous character in At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964). Marins plays the lead, dressed in a black top hat and cape with bushy eyebrows, straggly beard and mustache, and outrageously long, curved fingernails. In the film, Coffin Joe is the local undertaker and evil town bully who is searching for the ultimate woman to sire his child and perpetuate his evil. He puts several damsels though hideous tests- like having spiders crawl over their body while they sleep- to see if they measure up. Most fail the test and die, but on the Day of the Dead the victims rise from their coffins to get their revenge.
Crudely filmed in black & white, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul is remarkably potent stuff for 1964- filled with scandalous anti-Catholic rantings, nudity, sex and sadism. The movie became a sensation and Coffin Joe became a cult figure akin to Freddy of Nightmare On Elm Street fame. Marins follow up This Night I Will Take Your Corpse (1967) begins where the other film left off and continues Coffin Joe’s reign of terror. There are scenes that scald the mind- women are covered with 50 real tarantulas and left in a pit filled with real snakes. Marins also adds an amazing color sequence in which Coffin Joe travels to hell, a surrealistic snow palace of writhing, screaming bodies. The whole film is like a nightmarish poem, disturbing and scary and pathological.
The Strange World Of Coffin Joe is a trio of horror stories about a necrophiliac; the last and most shocking of which includes Coffin Joe kidnapping a couple and forcing them to endure a series of tortures.
Marins also made Awakening Of The Beast about LSD, which included some striking hallucinatory sequences and ended up getting banned by the Brazilian government for many years. In Hallucinations Of A Deranged Mind, Marins simultaneously montages many of the scenes that had been banned in his previous films. (Don’t watch this one on a hangover).
Audiences so identified Marins with the “Ze do Caixao” character that when he once ran for public office, people voted for Coffin Joe instead of Marins, invalidating the ballots. As for his obsession with children, Marins married several times and has 23 children! When he used to film in an abandoned synagogue that became his studio, Jose was also known for holding notorious casting calls where he would force aspiring actors to let rats and snakes crawl all over them (the police were called in several times).
Marins tried to make different types of films, but it was hard to escape “Coffin Joe.” In End Of Man (1971) he starred as “Finis Hominis,” a Christ-like figure who is first seen rising up out of the ocean naked and subsequently goes around Brazil inadvertently causing miracles. Bunuel-like in its conception (the man is really an escaped lunatic from a local asylum), it has some nice touches, but was a flop at the box office because it didn’t have the requisite cruelty and shocks of his earlier films.
In 1978 he made Perversion, a Lorena Bobbitt tale of an evil, rich industrialist (played, naturally, by Marins) who bites off the nipple of the local woman he rapes and keeps it in a brandy snifter. He finally gets his when the victim’s sister seduces and castrates him. Marins based this on a true case, in fact the accused woman helped produce the film and Marins had her play the part of the lawyer. Marins went on to make scores of movies and even attempted to make an anti-porno film entitled 24 Hours Of Explicit Sex. He hired the ugliest people he could round up and even included a scene with a woman making simulated love to a dog, but to his utter shock it was a huge success and played theaters for months, and he was forced to make a sequel: 48 Hours Of Hallucinatory Sex.
He even incorporated his actual eye operation into a film and when told Bunuel had done that in Un Chien Andalou, Marins said: “But did he cut his own eye open?” In 2008 he made Embodiment Of Evil where Coffin Joe is released from Sao Paulo prison and his faithful hunchback servant Bruno and a new entourage of punked-out kids search anew for the perfect receptacle of his demon seed. Corrupt cops and a vengeful priest hunt him down. Scene after scene of surreal bloody madness reminded you that Marins had not lost his edge.
I was first exposed to Marins’ films from Something Weird Video, helmed by the late, great Mike Vraney who tirelessly rescued hundreds of bizarre films from the vaults and introduced new audiences to such mind-scrambling madness as The Curious Dr. Humpp, Horrors Of Spider Island, The Sinful Dwarf, not to mention Doris Wishman classics like Nude On The Moon and restored-from-the negative Herschell Gordon Lewis films. He released the Marins films on VHS, scrambling the brains of cinemaniacs who were flabbergasted by the movies. Purists have objected to the Coffin Joe moniker and complain that we should say “Ze do Caixao.” But according to Mike Vraney, Marins was delighted with the name and thrilled with his newfound accessibility. For me, Marins‘ films were a true discovery- a man whose dark visions and disturbing imagery were unlike anything I’d experienced before. Cheaply made and filled with amateur acting, Jose’s films were also genuinely creepy and utterly fascinating. I had nightmares for weeks after binging on them, and that hadn’t happened to me since I saw the musical version of Lost Horizon with Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann.
There is a great documentary Coffin Joe: The Strange World Of Jose Mojica Marins by Andre Barcinski and Ivan Finotti that delves into his amazing life and career, and Barcinski wrote a gorgeous looking book about Marins called Maldito, which I proudly own (even though it’s in Portuguese). I had the golden opportunity to meet Jose Mojica Marins in the East Village once when he was in the States on a publicity tour for his films. I went with filmmaker Frank Henenlotter and his good friend Peter Clark (who shot a great picture of Coffin Joe looming over me with his extraordinary long nails).
We will miss you, Coffin Joe.
Dennis this is a great piece of work. Coffin Joe (whom I have never heard of before today) is truly a phenomenon. Wow. Women covered in real tarantulas and dropped into snake pits? Jeez. Who knew?