At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

Brazil's first horror film, written and directed by and starring José Mojica Marins as the creation that made him a national institution: Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe, a top-hatted undertaker with claw-length fingernails and a monologue against God ready for every occasion. He spends the film terrorising his small town in search of a woman fit to bear his perfect son, blaspheming cheerfully at anyone who objects. Made for almost nothing in 1964 and promptly cut by the censors, it is crude, blasphemous and oddly hypnotic.

Coffin Joe grew into a franchise across comics and television and a national bogeyman in his own right, and it all starts here.