José Mojica Marins

José Mojica Marins (13 March 1936 – 19 February 2020) was a Brazilian filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, television presenter and actor best known for creating and playing the horror figure Zé do Caixão, internationally called Coffin Joe. Born in São Paulo, he grew up around a family-owned cinema and began making short films as a teenager. His work developed outside Brazil’s major studio system, often with very small budgets, improvised methods and casts that mixed professional performers with local participants. Mojica introduced Coffin Joe in At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma, 1964). The character is an undertaker with a black top hat, cape, long fingernails and a fiercely materialist worldview. He rejects religion, considers fear and compassion weaknesses, and pursues what he calls the “perfect child,” believing that his bloodline must continue through a woman he judges genetically worthy. The film is widely identified as Brazil’s first feature-length horror film. Its shocking violence, blasphemous dialogue and funeral imagery made Mojica a controversial public figure. He continued the story with This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver, 1967), in which Coffin Joe survives an attack and resumes his search for a suitable mother for his heir. Although most of the film is black and white, it contains an elaborate color sequence depicting a vision of Hell, an especially notable technical and visual departure in Brazilian genre cinema of the period. Mojica also made The Strange World of Zé do Caixão (O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão, 1968), an anthology film featuring three macabre stories. His 1970 film The Awakening of the Beast (O Despertar da Besta), also known as The Ritual of the Beast, combined horror, drug imagery, social satire and courtroom-like scenes involving psychiatric testimony. Brazilian authorities censored the film during the military dictatorship, and it did not receive a commercial release until 1981. Censorship, debt and production difficulties affected Mojica’s career for decades, but Coffin Joe retained a devoted cult following in Brazil and abroad. After years away from feature directing, Mojica completed Embodiment of Evil (Encarnação do Demônio, 2008), the final installment of the Coffin Joe trilogy. In it, the character is released from prison after decades and again seeks to create his “perfect” descendant. The film premiered at the 2008 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. Mojica’s films influenced later Brazilian horror creators through their confrontational mixture of folklore, eroticism, anti-clerical provocation and independent filmmaking. He died in São Paulo at age eighty-three.