Coffin Joe Is Back!

Thrilling news: There's a new Coffin Joe film called Embodiment of Evil in the works! Directed and starring Jose Mojica Marins, the Brazilian cult legend whose Coffin Joe films in the late 1960s were massive hits, is back with what looks like another sick classic. Marins was born in Sao Paulo on March 13th, 1929 and got his first camera at age 12. Two incidents in his youth altered him -- at a funeral he attended, a corpse rose from the coffin (the man had catalepsy), and once when he was walking through a graveyard ghostly shapes rose from the graves and badly frightened him (a phenomenon known as "will-of-the-wisp") -- as well as a nightmare in which Marins saw himself dragged into an open grave by a man dressed in black. This triggered his creation of the evil character "Ze do Caixao" (Coffin Joe) and he later used (and starred) as this figure in a cape, top hat and elongated nails in At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1963) and in the sequel This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967). Coffin Joe is an evil town bully who is searching for the ultimate woman to sire his child. He puts several gals through hideous tests -- like having spiders crawl across them while they sleep or tossed into a pit of snakes -- to see if they measure up. Most fail the test and die but their bodies rise up on the Day of the Dead for revenge.

Crudely filmed in black and white they were (and still are) remarkably potent shockers -- filled with blasphemous anti-Catholic rantings, nudity, sex and sadism. They were instant smash hits and made Coffin Joe a cult figure like Freddie Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street. Marins went on to make scores of other disturbing films and one of my fondest memories was having my picture taken (by Peter Clark) with "Coffin Joe" as he was menacing my head with his creepy elongated nails on a trip he made to New York in the 1990s. But I had no idea he was going to resurrect the Coffin Joe franchise and now I can't wait to see the film!