In 1964, the black-clad figure who would soon become Zé do Caixão (“Coffin Joe”) appeared in a nightmare to a struggling Brazilian filmmaker named José Mojica Marins, and quickly tumbled his way onscreen as the magnetic pole of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul. As portrayed by Marins, Joe burst onscreen as an instantly iconic horror presence: snazzily dressed all in black with a top hat and a demonic monobrow, and, most notably, talon-like fingernails the size of paring knives.

Joe’s first two classic appearances (Soul and its 1967 sequel, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse) quickly established the rules for the character beyond his iconic look. Coffin Joe, a mortician by trade, is wildly sadistic, favoring elaborate tortures that often utilize tarantulas and snakes. Joe is megalamoniacal, constantly asserting his personal superiority over the common rabble of peasantry. Joe is militantly atheistic (a shocking in the deeply Catholic Brazil of the 60s—Joe not only loudly denies the existence of God, but even eats lamb on Good Friday!) Joe is obsessed with securing the immortality of his bloodline, constantly searching for a woman brave and depraved enough to be worthy of bearing him a son. And, curiously, while Joe has no supernatural powers of his own—he triumphs over his enemies, whether musclemen or an entire posse of townsfolk, by cunning, bravado, and sheer force of will—he is always beset by occult forces: curses from his victims, visions of ghosts, and, in Corpse, a memorable trip to Hell itself (which Joe refuses to believe in, despite his ten-minute firsthand technicolor torture tour.)

Although they have their rough patches—Joe can get long-winded when discussing either his own superiority or his lust for a child—the first two films are horror classics. Zé do Caixão became a sensation in Brazil, a horror mainstay with the look of a Freddy Kruger and the cultural reach of a Dracula. Marins launched a series of comic books, TV guest spots (most now lost), and personal appearances in character. Strangely, Marins would not directly continue the Coffin Joe saga for forty years after Corpse; but the character would reappear in various guises, most of which are covered in Arrow’s box set, “Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe.”

Although he does not appear in any of the three stories that comprise The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968), Joe lends his name to the film and introduces it (“You can’t accept the terror because you are the terror!” Joe proclaims as a lightning storm rages). Zé do Caixão even has his own theme song here, an a capella folk hymn (“it’s strange, it’s very strange, Coffin Joe’s world,” moans the lead singer over the credits, as the camera focuses up the miniskirt of a gyrating go-go dancer.) The three stories here are fairly standard horror tales, like grindhouse “Twilight Zone” episodes. The first is an excuse for a long rape scene; the second, an arty dialogue-free experiment about a poor balloon seller obsessed with a prototypical girl from Impanema, is an excuse for a foot fetish necrophilia scene. The third segment is the most noteworthy, as Marins himself appears as a professor character espousing a Sadean philosophy almost indistinguishable from Coffin Joe’s (with the exception that he’s not obsessed with procreation). It features the most extreme and depraved tortures Marins had yet put on film, sort of a “120 Days of Sodom” compressed into a week or so, progressing from simple whippings through acid in the face to spousal blood drinking, ending with a cannibal feast.

Next up is The Awakening of the Beast [O Ritual dos Sadicos] (1970), in which Coffin Joe appears, but only in hallucination scenes. The movie begins with case studies related by a psychiatrist about how drugs in Brazil are creating sexual perversion: a woman injects herself with some drug, strips for a quartet of watching men, and uses a chamber pot; a schoolgirl is picked up and taken to a hippie pot-n-booze bacchanal where she becomes the willing centerpiece of an orgy (ending with her impaled by a seven-foot staff wielded by Jesus); a woman sniffs coke and watches her daughter make love to a servant while petting a pony; and so on. Marins appears as himself, for some reason included among the panel of psychiatrists. Eventually, the chief psychiatrist reveals his plan to perform an experiment, taking four test subjects to see This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse and then injecting them with LSD. This leads to the film’s major set pieces: four color hallucinations (a la Corpse’s Hell sequences) in which the test subjects experience nightmarish hallucinations featuring Coffin Joe. These segments feature some of Marins’ most phantasmagoric imagery: Joe descending down a staircase of human bodies, a spider with a blonde woman’s head, and faces drawn with magic marker on a lineup of plump asses (an image that is far creepier than it sounds). It ends with a (lame) twist, but it’s a worthwhile entry in the series for fans of Joe’s wilder, less sadistic and more surreal side. It’s also the first of several “meta” appearances by Coffin Joe, in which Marins appears as himself, only to find that his unruly creation has a separate existence in the world of dreams.

1970’s Finis Hominis: The End of Man and 1972’s When the Gods Fall Asleep can be lumped together. Marins plays Finis Hominis, a kind of mystical inversion of Coffin Joe, in that this character is pure humanitarian beneficence, and has supernatural powers. It seems like Marins is trying to rehabilitate his image here with a Christlike character who would be more sympathetic to Catholic audiences, as well as helming a film that might be more palatable to critics due to its occasional social commentary and satire. There is plenty of perversion and degradation in the scenarios that Finis finds himself fixing, however. Finis emerges naked from the sea, inadvertently causes a wheelchair-bound woman to leap up, cured, and, after walking around São Paulo nude for a while, and  eventually finds himself clad in swami garb. He performs various small-scale miracles, becomes a celebrity, defends an adulteress, turns down an offer of free love from some topless hippie chicks (throwing coins at them to expose their hypocrisy), and foils an unfaithful wife’s plan to kill her husband. Finis returns (“that weird man everyone was talking about is back again,” a newscaster informs us) in When the Gods Fall Asleep. It begins with an odd prologue featuring a Brazilian Atlas, painted bronze, balancing a beach-ball planet on his shoulders. In this one, Finis makes peace between street gangs, referees a romantic disagreement jungle gypsy wife-swapping party, and convinces the women to ditch their dates a sleazy underground nightclub/brothel. The bad taste highlight is when Marins films an unsimulated macumba ritual where a guy dressed like Dracula kills chickens with his teeth and drinks their blood. Finis later intervenes to stop the human sacrifice (of the innocents, at least), but those poor chickens! Both movies switch back and forth between luxurious color and black and white, seemingly without reason (the reason was probably financial).

Notably missing from Arrow’s set is 1974’s The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe [Exorcismo Negro], which brings Zé back another meta-narrative experiment where Marins struggles with the independent existence of his famous character. According to reports, Exorcism stars Marins as himself, planning a new movie; he gets involved in a Satanic ritual that summons Coffin Joe, but defeats him (at least for the time being) by professing his own belief in God (one of many insincere “square up” endings included in the Coffin Joe films, since Marins himself was almost as militant in his atheism as Joe). This movie was probably excluded from “Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe” due to the impossibility of clearing the music Marins, um, appropriated for this outing (including the James Bond theme and large sections of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”)

The next to films in the set, The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures (1976) and Hellish Flesh (1977), are non-Coffin Joe horrors. Hostel features a Joe-like protagonist, however, who sets up his hotel as a trap to send various evildoers (an adulterous couple, corrupt businessmen, more hippies) to Hell. It begins with an opening sequence where voluptuous women in brightly-colored, diaphanous gowns dance to bongo music as men in uncanny masks hide in the forest, ending with the pseudo-Zé rising from a coffin in complete regalia. He takes reservations and squints a lot, but never tries to sire a child with an immoral superwoman. It’s a fairly by-the-numbers horror, with much of the running time devoted to the damned souls having orgies in a last hurrah before not-Zé sends them to Hell, but it does have some Marins touches. There are giallo-influenced lighting schemes and overuse of the zoom lens, tropes familiar to Eurotrash features of the time. There’s also a bizarre montage near the end featuring a clock, a (real) beating heart, and some of Marins’ favorite vermin edited in at random: tarantulas, mice, cockroaches, snakes, maggots, and crabs (that last critter is a new one for Joe). Hellish Flesh is a horror melodrama with no Joe connection whatsoever. In it, Marins plays a scientist whose unfaithful wife scars him with acid in a bungled murder attempt. He plots revenge, which plays out with deliciously cruel irony. Appealingly, although it’s shot in the disco era, the high life of the Brazilian milieu Marins films has a swinging Sixties feel to it. The centerpiece here is long, squirmy, shocking footage of Marins’ actual eye surgery—his attempt to do Un Chien Andalou one better?

Marins returns to Zé do Caixão for the penultimate time in 1978 with Hallucinations in a Deranged Mind, which is end-to-end the weirdest Coffin Joe movie ever made. In fact, Hallucinations plays out as a pure surrealist horror film, with a flimsy narrative erected to give it some structure. The director leans into the hallucinatory aspects of Coffin Joe films, which, we like to believe, lies at the heart of his real cinematic interests. The downside to Hallucinations, besides its brutally non-narrative structure, is that it consists mostly of recycled material: principally, re-edited versions of the Hell scenes from This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse and the LSD trips from The Awakening of the Beast. He also includes newly tinted scenes from the black and white features. Some of the material is previously unseen, however, in the sense that it had formerly been removed by censors. Marins filmed about 35 minutes of new material for the 86 minute feature, making this essentially the clip show version of Coffin Joe. But what a maddening distillation it is! One memorable nightmare involves faces sticking out of a organ-like blob of reddish-orange flesh, a vision that predates the shunting of Society by more than a decade. The loose plot involves a psychiatrist who’s obsessed with the idea that Coffin Joe sees his fiancee as the “perfect woman” he can use to sire an heir and plans to abduct her. In another of those “meta” twists, the deranged doctor’s colleagues bring the real life Jose Mojica Marins in to explain that Coffin Joe is not real, just a character he created. Of course, it doesn’t work out that way.

After Hallucinations, Marins largely retired from horror, and turned to making softcore sex movies through the Eighties to pay the bills. He had one last blast of Joe in him, however: Embodiment of Evil (2008), which follows the main continuity established in the first two films and forms the conclusion of the official “Coffin Joe” trilogy. The elderly Zé is released from a decades-long imprisonment and almost immediately goes on a killing/impregnation spree. He’s opposed by corrupt Brazilian cops, a renegade Catholic priest, and the ghosts of his victims from Soul and Corpse (who appear before him in black and white). Unfortunately, Embodiment of Evil lacks the classic appeal and Gothic feel of the original Coffin Joe movies. Despite having a comparable budget, it somehow feels cheaper than the first two movies, whose black and white presentation and set-bound unreality gave them a classic, timeless feel akin to the Universal horrors of the 1930s; the bad-CGI red blood cells of Embodiment‘s opening, by contrast, will never age into anything more than camp. The emphasis on sadism and gore is garishly overdone in this finale; too often, it plays like a grimy, tiresome torture porn outing, with little of the authentic Coffin Joe mystique. But there are, of course, some memorable moments that transcend the B-atmosphere: the half-woman birthing tarantulas from her disemboweled torso is an unforgettable Marins vision. And the ending, which I won’t spoil, is truly audacious—if more than a little ridiculous.

The Arrow box set is the most exhaustive study of Marins’ work in existence. The special features are insane. The meatiest is probably the full-length 2001 Brazilian documentary The Strange World of José Mojica Marins, which is about what you would expect from a talking heads documentary of the sort—excepting the novelty of a sad anecdote about a dog Marins cast for a (softcore) bestiality scene in 24 Hours of Explicit Sex! Besides that, there are commentaries for every film, trailers, rare scenes from Marins’ early works, and some alternate footage. It seems like everyone on Arrow’s payroll contributes a video essay: Stephen Thrower talks for an hour and a half (!), while others devote their onscreen time to topics like the influence of De Sade, Coffin Joe as horror host, the role of women in Coffin Joe’s universe, Marins’ relationship to the Surrealists, the appeal of the Coffin Joe character to the neurodivergent, and just about any other Joe-related topic you can think of. Add in the six essays in the 90-page included booklet, and you have what amounts to a comprehensive academic study of Marins. It’s all attractively presented in a black box with a removable top.

All is not perfect with the Arrow release, however. The set inadvertently omitted subtitles from the second half of Awakening of the Beast. You may be able to get a replacement disc by following these instructions from Arrow (though we have no idea how long they’ll keep shipping replacements). The organization of the volume is also questionable; it can sometimes be hard to figure out which movie is on which disc, since the covers only feature one movie each even though most of them are double features (e.g., you’ll find At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul on the disc labeled The Strange World of Jose Mojica Marins). So there’s about a 50% chance you’ll need to check the back of the box to be sure which disc the movie you want to watch is on. Still, for anyone with the spare cash and a passing interest in Marins, Coffin Joe, and underground surrealist horror, this set is a steal and a must-purchase.

For another perspective, check out our Pod 366 discussion of this box set with Ian Jane of Rock, Shock, Pop!