José Mojica Marins’ At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul didn’t just kick off Brazil’s horror genre—it kicked the door open, kicked the viewer in the face, and then kicked dirt over its own madness while cackling in a cemetery. As the nation’s first homegrown horror film, it’s more blood-soaked parable than cohesive narrative, and less of a movie than a fever dream you have after eating expired feijoada. It is bold, tasteless, unpleasant, and wholly unique. A cult milestone for the bold and the bizarro, but by no means a polished gem—more like a rusted bone saw with Catholic guilt etched into the handle.
Welcome to Coffin Joe’s house of misogyny, misanthropy, and manic philosophical monologues. The titular character—Zé do Caixão to the locals, Coffin Joe to the exported VHS crowd—is a malevolent undertaker with a fashion sense borrowed from Nosferatu and a worldview cobbled together from Nietzsche, nihilism, and heavy doses of testosterone poisoning. He sneers at religion, love, and anything softer than a tarantula’s underbelly. And he really wants to have a baby. But not in a touching, “continuation of the family name” way. No, he wants the perfect child, a superhuman little bundle of darkness to carry on his bloodline and reign over a world of weaklings and fools.
What follows is 81 minutes of Zé do Caixão rampaging through his tiny Brazilian village, killing everyone who disagrees with him, and sexually terrorizing any woman who isn’t already dead or wearing a crucifix. It’s a nasty bit of business wrapped in a black cape and finished with a swirl of satanic moralizing. It’s also kind of brilliant, in the way a rabid street preacher with a PhD in cinema studies might be.
The Plot: Coffin Joe’s No Good, Very Bad Legacy Quest
Zé starts off the film unhappy with his infertile wife Lenita, so naturally, he kills her via spider bite. It’s one of the more original divorce proceedings on film. From there, he turns his gaze to Terezinha, the sweet, virginal fiancée of his best friend Antonio. Terezinha isn’t interested, because, well, she has eyes and a functioning sense of terror. But Zé doesn’t handle rejection well. He murders Antonio, gaslights the entire town into believing he’s an innocent mourner, and then—brace yourself—rapes Terezinha in a particularly graphic and uncomfortable sequence that sets the film’s moral compass somewhere south of Hell.
Terezinha’s suicide is followed by a prophecy from a local gypsy: Zé’s soul will be taken at midnight. Naturally, Zé laughs it off like any good horror protagonist who’s never seen a horror movie. But as midnight draws near, Zé begins to unravel like a cheap Halloween costume. Ghosts appear. Spiders crawl from coffins. Screams echo through crypts. In the end, the monsters come for the monster, and Zé ends the film as a wide-eyed corpse, surrounded by the ringing of church bells and the stench of cosmic irony.
The Good: A Cinematic Middle Finger in Funeral Black
There’s something admirable about At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul—its very existence is a form of rebellion. In 1964, Brazil was under a rising military dictatorship, censorship was tightening its grip, and polite society was not ready for a satanic, fingernail-gouging, necrophilia-adjacent horror film made by a man who looked like Dracula’s sloppier cousin. Yet here comes Mojica Marins, dragging a coffin and a camera through the favelas, screaming about the bloodline of man and the emptiness of religion.
Visually, the film is a nasty treat. Shot in stark black and white, the contrast is cranked so high that Zé’s black cloak looks like it could suck in the sun. The close-ups are sweaty, the lighting is sickly, and every other frame looks like it was filmed in a mausoleum lit by a flashlight with a dying battery. The atmosphere is pure death, which makes sense, since Marins supposedly filmed much of it on location in real cemeteries with borrowed corpses. (Method directing, we salute you.)
The performance of Marins as Coffin Joe is the film’s demented anchor. He chews through scenery, theology, and women with the same unhinged energy as a televangelist on bath salts. It’s a performance that wouldn’t work in any other context—but in this backwoods Brazilian carnival of horrors, it’s perfect. Joe is not just a character; he’s a sermon wrapped in blood and shouted at the audience like they owe him child support.
The Bad: Nihilism and Nihilism and Nihilism—Oh My
This is not a film for the squeamish, the moral, or the emotionally well-adjusted. It’s not even a film for most horror fans. Despite its cult status, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul plays like a film designed to test your patience with philosophy and your tolerance for watching a man shout “Continuation of the bloodline!” before committing his eighth felony.
The pacing is glacial. Dialogue stretches longer than Zé’s fingernails. Characters meander around like they’re trying to find their marks. And the plot, while linear, is about as subtle as a tombstone to the face. For all its shock value, the film has a tendency to repeat itself thematically. Coffin Joe’s rants about religion and bloodlines are profound the first time, irritating the fourth time, and exhausting the tenth. You get the sense that Marins really, really wanted to say something, but the editing software didn’t include the “brevity” plugin.
Also, let’s be honest: this movie hates women. Terezinha, Lenita, Marta—they’re all either too weak to fight back or punished for existing. It’s 1960s exploitation cinema, sure, but there’s a difference between portraying violence and wallowing in it. Even by grindhouse standards, Zé’s misogyny is hard to digest.
The Verdict: Horror History With a Side of Acid Reflux
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul is a historical oddity, a work of raw, unfiltered id that helped birth a genre in a country unaccustomed to cinematic bloodbaths. It’s bold, it’s brutal, and it’s unapologetically offensive. But is it good?
Let’s say it’s important. It’s the midnight toast at a funeral for subtlety. It’s the kind of film that earns its cult status not because it’s well-made, but because it’s unforgettable in its grotesqueness. Coffin Joe may be a despicable creation, but he’s one of horror’s most bizarre and fascinating anti-heroes.
If you’re in the mood for something different, disturbing, and deeply weird, go ahead—let Coffin Joe take your soul. Just don’t expect to get it back clean.
Rating: 2.5 sacrilegious spider bites out of 4
Because sometimes horror is supposed to feel like an exorcism conducted by a man with a mustache and a death wish.
