Editor’s Choice: The Fantastic Evil of Coffin Joe!
With the upcoming March 29th release of The Embodiment of Evil, by Synapse Films, Editor-in-chief – and long time Coffin Joe fanatic – Marc Patterson writes a three-part retrospective to this iconic figure of horror, a series that will be topped off with our official Blu-ray disc review of The Embodiment of Evil!
Part One: Introduction to Coffin Joe and his creator – Jose Mojica Marins
by Marc Patterson
Coffin Joe was the original serial slasher. He predates Michael Myers by sixteen years and Freddy Krueger by over twenty. Despite this, Coffin Joe remains largely unknown and under appreciated amongst a larger audience of horror fans. With over a dozen films released between 1963 and 1987, Coffin Joe evolved from being a mere mortal with psychopathic tendencies to a full-blown monstrous demon, practically invincible and unable of being defeated by his enemies. Though a mystery he may be to a larger US audience, Coffin Joe is in fact one of the more iconic figures of international horror infamy and all but a national hero in his native country of Brazil, though he certainly wasn’t such in his early days.
Coffin Joe, or Zé do Caixão, is the creation of Jose Mojica Marins, a Brazilian born in 1936, ironically on Friday, the 13th of March. Raised by parents of meager means who owned a movie theater, you could say he literally grew up in the cinema. He began making films at a young age, though it was in his later formative years where he began showing signs that his path was to be distinct from any Brazilian filmmaker who came before. Marins created the character of Coffin Joe after having a particularly affecting nightmare where he was dragged into a cemetery by a creature cloaked in black, before discovering it was his own grave. The following day he immediately went out and scripted At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul.
At first Marins’ intention was to only write and direct, but unable to find someone who was willing to take on the heinous role, Marins decided to don the black cape and top hat, grow out his fingernails and become Coffin Joe himself. Surprisingly, Zé do Caixão isn’t a supernatural monster constructed in a mythological world, but a very real man whose origins trace to a post-World War II home front. Marins reveals in an interview that Coffin Joe fought in World War II, came home to find his wife had been cheating on him with another man, and renounced all religion and essentially went to a really dark place inside of himself.
Being Coffin Joe was a tough road to hoe for Marins. He and his creation became nearly one and the same in the eye of the public, something that even became the subject for a future film, The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe. Early on in his career Marins was arrested and had his studio shut down for making his near-satanic cinematic perversions, deemed to be blasphemous. Blasphemous they certainly were. Marins was also all but excommunicated by the church, something of a rather serious matter for a man who does not live in the same theological headspace as his alter-ego.
Marins never made much money from his films and used whatever proceeds he earned to finance his next one, literally surviving from film to film. As no distributor would pick the films up, they were literally financed and shown at Marins’ expense.
But who exactly is Coffin Joe?
The character of Coffin Joe is a sinister undertaker without a conscious or soul. His total lack of belief in God or the Devil becomes the primary source of his strength. His only motivation is the continuity of blood – the birth of a son. To accomplish this he kills and tortures anyone who might get in the way of his relentless search for the perfect woman to bear his son. It should almost go without saying that Coffin Joe is easily one of the most misogynistic characters ever put to celluloid. Obviously the objects of his lust, if you can even call it lust, don’t go willingly into his arms and the abject manner in which he tortures and rapes his victims is just all part of a day’s work for this soulless monster.
Through the 60s, Marins’ productions were dominantly made in black and white, with very little money, though the violence was just as graphic as what might be presented in a Herschell Gordon Lewis film. The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968) in particular contains some of the most graphically disturbing scenes of cannibalism set to film. It’s not that the violence is necessarily believable, and especially by today’s standards, it’s more how that scene is filmed and its context within a larger perverted morality tale spun by Coffin Joe as he illustrates the hypocrisy of faith in a most extreme manner.
More than his heavily pronounced violent side, Coffin Joe is defined by being a philosophical villain – more so than any modern monster. He openly mocks the belief of his fellow town people, flaunting his atheism in their face with disdain and arrogance. The opening monologue at the beginning of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul becomes the singular philosophy that defines each of his following films:
What is life?
It is the beginning of death.
What is death?
It is the end of life.
What is existence?
It is the continuity of blood.
What is blood?
It is the reason to exist.
Coffin Joe’s films weren’t seen by US audiences until the early 90s when Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video brought a slew of Marins’ films across the border and introduced them to the US for the first time. Only three of those films have seen a formal DVD release to date: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, and Awakening of the Beast. These three were, until a few years ago, largely considered to round out “The Coffin Joe Trilogy”, though most purists knew Awakening of the Beast wasn’t actually the third film in the original trilogy. That final film had yet to be made, and would eventually become The Embodiment of Evil.
We’ll pick this feature up in our second installment where we look at the “Trilogy of Terror”, and then in part three where we examine other notable Coffin Joe films, before we top everything off with a review of the new Blu-ray release of Embodiment of Evil, from Synapse Films.
