Delírios de um Anormal
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“…there’s this spiritist center in Bahia that summons an Exu, or Zé do Caixão spirit. I’ve been to these places, incognito of course, wearing sunglasses, hiding my nails, the whole deal. And then someone channels Zé do Caixão, claiming it’s me. There’s this narrative that Zé do Caixão was already a spirit and I just summoned him. I pay them homage in this film. I leave it up to the viewers to decide for themselves. Is he real?”–José Mojica Marins on the commentary track to Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind
DIRECTED BY: José Mojica Marins
FEATURING: José Mojica Marins, Jorge Peres, Magna Miller
PLOT: Psychiatrist Hamilton has terrible nightmares where he believes Coffin Joe is coming to take his wife away to use her to breed his offspring. His concerned colleagues call in José Mojica Marins, the creator of the Coffin Joe character, to convince him that the character is fictional and all in his imagination. The cure works; or does it?
BACKGROUND:
- Zé do Caixão (Anglicized as “Coffin Joe”) was a character created and portrayed by low-budget Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins. Beginning in the late 60s, Coffin Joe appeared in a trilogy of canonical feature films, also appearing in Marins’ work in dream sequences, host segments, personal appearances, his own line of comic books, and so on. The character is sadistic, but ultimately more amoral than evil; he disdains religion and the supernatural, and quests eternally to find the perfect “superior” woman to breed with so he can sire superhuman progeny. Joe was known for his black top hat and cloak, his monobrow, and, most notably, for his uncut fingernails, which Marins grew to over 9 inches in length. Though nearly unknown outside of Brazil during the height of his popularity, within that country Coffin Joe was a homegrown bogeyman of superstar status, roughly equivalent to Freddy Kruger.
- Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind was created from repurposed and unused footage from This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, The Strange World of Coffin Joe, The Awakening of the Beast, and others, mixed with newly shot scenes (there is approximately 35 minutes of new footage in the 86-minute movie). Some of the reused scenes had previously been nixed by censors.
- The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974) used a similar premise of director Marins facing off against his own character.
- Marins says that the inspiration for this film came from a real life request from a psychiatrist. The doctor’s wife was obsessed with Marins’ Coffin Joe character, and seemed to believe he existed independently. Marins visited the couple and watched one of his films with them on a midnight TV broadcast; during the screening, he reminisced how he suffered from diarrhea and painful corns during the shooting of certain scenes. The spell was broken and the woman no longer believed in Coffin Joe.
- Editor Nilcemar Leyart estimates that the final film contains more than 4,700 cuts.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many garage-surrealist possibilities here it boggles the mind—the woman-headed spider, the magic-markered buttocks, the human staircase—but ultimately the dominating figure is, appropriately, Coffin Joe himself: the dark, dagger-fingered nightmare undertaker who orchestrates this parade of Boschian delights.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Faces on asses; multi-headed torture blob
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A circus of the damned crawling out of a cinematic scrapheap, Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind is the distilled essence of Coffin Joe at his most irrational and insistent.
Clip from Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind
COMMENTS: A man circles a bikini babe while beating a bongo; after each circuit he stops and a new set of female legs pop into the foreground, forming a tunnel of thighs. Another, bearded man caresses a woman in a black void. Suddenly, Coffin Joe appears, and draws the woman to him. She is instantly hypnotized. The man protests, but Coffin Joe extends his claw and responds, “Men surrender to my force, and their eyes get scared before the vision of my supreme reign of violence, anguish and pain of the perpetual punishment for the weak and inferior ones!” We then see a welter of images from this sadistic reign: topless women gyrating their rears at the camera, a levitating pitchfork, damsels trapped in a snake pit, wicked body piercing, tarantulas crawling across bodices, people in their underwear leering at the camera through Halloween masks, and Joe pushing a half-dozen scantily clad women into a pile to be whipped by an assistant.
Then the bearded man, Hamilton, wakes up. It was all a 15-minute nightmare! Or was it? Hallucinations is a showcase for Marins’ horror hallucinations, a kind of greatest hits clip show. It’s supported by a tissue-thin narrative that is playfully meta, but hardly deep. Playing an idealized version of himself, Marins carefully delineates his personality from Coffin Joe’s. It was likely an issue that he dealt with in real life, since his portrayal of the character is so powerful that audiences must have assumed that he was a practicing sadist and madman. But if this film documents a battle of personalities between the kindly and helpful José Mojica Marins and his sinister alter-ego, it is worth noting which one ultimately wins out. The real life Marins must necessarily yield to his larger-than-life alter ego. Coffin Joe is too insistent, too persistent, too vital to take a back seat to his creator. Marins knows that his progeny will outlive him. The attempt to escape the tyranny of Xe’s hypnotic personality is as hopeless for Marins as for Hamilton and his wife.
Hallucinations is a brutally unstructured slideshow of bizarre and gory images, like an exposition staged by E.C. Comics artists under the influence of hashish. It’s shot with the ambition of a Jodorowsky, but the craft, preoccupations, and resources of an H. G. Lewis. (Marins’ cannibalism scenes are more graphic and shocking than anything you’ll see in Blood Feast.) Castle walls are obviously cardboard rather than stone; props and costumes seem to have been sourced from the 70s Brazilian equivalent of a Spirit Halloween. Live animals—spiders, snakes, frogs, centipedes—serve as cheap but effective special effects, as does nudity. Yet Marins knows how to stage a spectacle within his limitations. Body parts stick out of walls, a smoking bug puppet is incinerated with a wave of Joe’s hand. Sets may be cramped, but they’re crowded with extras, making them feel epic. Fast-paced edits keep you from lingering on any faults. The faces painted on buttocks sound like a ridiculous idea, but in practice they are actually creepy as hell. Psychedelic lighting, especially the vibrant pinks and purples, highlight the hallucinatory intent. Marins had the clever idea to play the horror score supplied by the composer backwards, creating an uncanny soundscape further decorated with the distant screams of torture victims. His means are limited, but his imagination is boundless.
Marins’ first two Coffin Joe movies, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, are undoubtedly superior works. But never let it be said that Hallucinations is anything less than exploitation of the highest degree. This is something different. It’s horror candy: bitter and bloody candy dosed with LSD, but a treat nevertheless. It’s a psychedelic spook show, audacious and atrocious, but with auteurial force: it’s very much the inimitable vision of one man. Whether that man is José Mojica Marins or Coffin Joe is left for you to decide.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“Odds and ends of a grindhouse Pirandello…”–Fernando F. Croce, Cinepassion
IMDB LINK: Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (1978)
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
The Aesthetics of Hunger and the Flowers of Evil – A brief, archived article about Brazil’s “Mouth of Garbage” cinema, and Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind in particular, from something called PicPal
The Latter Years of Coffin Joe – This site’s review of Arrow’s 2024 Coffin Joe box set, with capsules on the later films (we offer full reviews of the first two Coffin Joe movies). This link also includes our podcast discussion with Ian Jane about the box set, discussing each film.
HOME VIDEO INFO: Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind has not been released separately on home video (besides an ancient VHS tape), but occupies disc 5 of Arrow’s Coffin Joe box set “Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe” (buy), where it shares space with the non-Joe horror Hellish Flesh. None of the special features on this disc (or the others) are particularly pertinent to Hallucinations except for the grindhouse-style Brazilian trailer and a commentary track with Marins and his long-time editor Nilcemar Leyarte, ported over from a previous Brazilian DVD release. Complete details of the entire box set can be found in this post.
Those who don’t want to foot the bill for the entire 10-film box set are in luck, because Hallucinations can be purchased digitally on its own for a reasonable price (buy on demand).
