Played by writer/director Jose Mojica Marins, Coffin Joe is Brazils first horror icon. A bearded, black-garbed gravedigger who wears a top hat and cape, Joe has one wish: to maintain the continuity of the blood. Because his wife cannot bear him a child, he kills her and sets about finding a suitable woman to grant him an heir, leaving the usual trail of corpses in his wake. For an early 60s effort shot in monochrome, Midnight is surprisingly explicit: a card player has a finger severed by a broken bottle, a man is whipped during a bar brawl and the local doctor has his eyes gouged out before Joe pours acid over him. Marins makes underground pictures on threadbare budgets part exploitation, part art-house but the violence in his films is more shocking than anything that played American Drive-ins around the same time. A direct sequel, This Night Ill Possess Your Corpse, followed in 1967, but despite appearances in The Strange World Of Coffin Joe (1968), The Awakening Of The Beast (1969) and Hallucinations Of A Deranged Mind (1978), the final part of the Coffin Joe Trilogy didnt appear until 2008. Embodiment Of Evil ups the violence and nudity, perhaps attempting to hide the fact that although Marins was still attempting to find the perfect woman, he was 72 at the time of filming. Which other grindhouse classics belong on this list? Share your favourites below in the comments thread.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
