Director José Mojica Marins inhabits the role of Zé do Caixão, better known as Coffin Joe, a diabolically creepy gravedigger with wicked nails like claws who sports a top hat and cloak as he terrorizes the villagers with his evil desires. Set in a small, superstitious village, the film follows the blasphemous undertaker Zé, who is obsessed with finding the “perfect woman” to bear his child and continue his bloodline, scorning religion and morality along the way.

Zé’s reign of terror includes murder, sexual violence, and relentless cruelty, all justified by his nihilistic, Nietzschean worldview.

His lover, Lenita, can not bear him a child. He begins to pursue Terezinha de Oliveira (Magda Mei), who is engaged to his friend, Antonio. Zé do Caixão murders Lenita & Antonio. He rapes Terezinha, hoping to get her pregnant, but she commits suicide instead. Comes the Day of the Dead, as he mocks the supernatural and torments the townsfolk, he is warned by the local gypsy that his deeds will come back to haunt him and the spirits of his victims will avail themselves at midnight and send him to hell! The film climaxes in a nightmarish sequence of ghostly revenge, with Zé pursued by the dead and ultimately destroyed by his own guilt and paranoia.

Zé do Caixão: “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!”

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) is a landmark in horror cinema, recognized as the first Brazilian-produced horror film and the debut of the infamous Coffin Joe (Zé do Caixão). Marins’s film is a brutal and surreal journey into a nightmarish landscape… shocking audiences with its violence, blasphemy, and transgressive themes, launching Coffin Joe as a cult icon and opening the door for a new era of Brazilian horror.

5 Down, 145 to go! – Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl, is on a mission to keep it short!