This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no TeuCadáver, 1967)
Certain great creative people become the focal point of one’s life mission: to view their work and immerse oneself in whatever aesthetic they have to offer. For me, Jose Mojica Marins was one of these people. I first became aware of him via Phil Hardy’s Encyclopedia of Horror Film, a book I got for my—was it ninth?—birthday and to which I owe a great lot in terms of critical and intellectual approach.
Marins, along with men like Mario Bava, Riccardo Freda, Jean Rollin, Jesus Franco, and Michael Reeves, became one of those Other Cinema World shadow-demons whose work was nearly impossible to obtain in non-mutilated, non-dubbed prints for a long time, until the Tarantino era made it cool to look beyond the shores of English-speaking nations for great trash cinema, and now, in the DVD era, such directors are becoming widely available. When I met Bava, a master, I swooned! Freda! Rollin was a strangeo on par with Buuel.
Because these people were years ahead of other cynical English-language horror filmmakers in terms of style and intelligence, you could forgive their ropy effects and the clumsiness that regularly contaminated their work owing to limited resources. Finally, one Australian television station began screening the films of Jose Mojica Marins, the famed Sao Paulo nut who set up his studio in an abandoned church, hired penniless and homeless actors, and tormented them by having tarantulas crawl over them and walling them up in the name of art.
According to the Encyclopedia of Horror Film, Jose Mojica Marins was playing his own schizophrenia on-screen via his renowned character, Zé de Caixao, “Coffin Joe”—and how, finally, Jose Mojica Marins himself battled and beat his demonic alter ego, Zé, in subsequent films! In the book, his pictures were also described as “a very sick man’s home movies,” which piqued my interest in works that were rancidly insane and strange, akin to a cheapo Latin Kenneth Anger or David Lynch. How could anybody possibly hope to compete with such a great figure in underground cinema?
Imagine my amazement and astonishment when I learned that his films are nothing more than garbage. I’ve only seen snippets of his second film, Tonight I Will Paint In Flesh Color, and sat through his first, At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul (A Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma), which was long banned in Brazil (Esta Noite Whatevero). Yes, they do resemble a terminally sick person’s home films. But not in the way that Kenneth Anger did. Just like in a movie, I’m at home. Anger was an expert at what he did.
The Mariners had about as much art as a house brick. The staging is reminiscent of bad reg theatre, and the acting… well, I won’t call it acting since it undermines the art of acting. The direction is terrible and dull. The photography is extremely good for a budget of around fifteen pesetas, and the special effects are pretty clever, yet it is completely devoid of anything like care, style, or atmosphere. A significant portion of the running time is spent sneaking about in what are supposed to be scary woods but seem to be someone’s back yard, and it’s peppered with ludicrous acts of sadism and violence that would be awful if they weren’t so blatantly false. Even though it’s just around seventy minutes long, it’s lengthy.
The finale of “I Will Take Your Soul” isn’t all that bad; the scene in a candle-strewn tomb when Zé goes mad and dies (only to return alive and well in the sequel) has a Grand Guignol feel to it. Otherwise, the film’s terrible amateurism is repulsive. The scene in which Zé beats his lover to a pulp, then licks the blood off her face and rapes her is extremely memorable, coming in second only to the scene in which a tarantula crawls over a female. Our Seor Marins is a beautiful individual.
Marins created Zé in a comic book before portraying him in films, dressed in a black undertaker’s suit, a Lincoln hat, a scruffy Beat beard, and claw-like fingernails. He’s a nasty little jerk when he’s not spouting his endless and repetitious “blasphemous” rants against God and morality, which are so childish that they can only upset members of the Brazilian Catholic church. He gets his retaliation, which may contradict everything we’ve been urged to enjoy (and we haven’t even done that; we want our screen perverts to be more fashionable than this). “Die right now!” If we’re happy Zé gets it, I’m shouting at the TV, at least in my circumstance.
