Contemplating Coffin Joe

One of the most enter­tain­ing essays in the below-mentioned col­lec­tion Exile Cinema is Canadian film­maker Guy Maddin’s ecstat­ic appre­ci­ation of Brazilian hor­ror auteur Jose Mojica Marins and his cine­mat­ic alter-ego Ze de Caixao (Coffin Joe). (Maddin, incid­ent­ally, has the unique dis­tinc­tion of being both a con­trib­ut­or to the book and one of its sub­jects.) Good cine­mat­ic fet­ish­ist that he is, he gets him­self into a right tizzy over Mojica’s, or maybe Ze’s, lower lip (before com­par­ing it to a liv­er): “…rest­ing easy as it does on those coarse black chin whiskers, fat and sat­is­fied like a sati­ated cut­worm or like the vulva of a woman who’s been quite will­ingly stuffed into a hyper-realistic cow cos­tume and rolled into a busy bullpen.”

Yowsah.

And as you can see from the screen grab above, from 1964’s sem­in­al, and how, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Corpse, that lip is a for­mid­able sneer instrument.

So ima­gine my slight shock when, around 1994, on encoun­ter­ing Mojica/Ze in the flesh, I found him an almost …avun­cu­lar figure. 

This was a very big deal among the hor­ror movie drool­ers of the tri-state area. (“Drooler” being the pre­ferred term in my circle for “geek” or “fan­boy.” We still prefer it, in fact. And, yes, we do include ourselves.) The legendary Coffin Joe, whose intense hor­ror films had been much dis­cussed but little-seen, was to make an appear­ance at the Chiller Theatre Expo in Secaucus, to coin­cide with Something Weird’s VHS releases of some of the early films. 

Of course, Mojica was only about 28 when he made the first Coffin Joe film; now, he was now push­ing 60. Short of stature and walk­ing in a not-quite men­acing shuffle, he looked a little silly, decked out in his black cape, stovepipe hat (Maddin men­tions its probably-inadvertent Lincolnesque qual­ity), occult-inflected sil­ver jew­elry, and some long, cur­licuing fin­ger­nails. (Some friends were toy­ing with writ­ing a film com­edy centered on one of these horror-fan con­ven­tions, and after this one they included a sequence in which a Mojica-esque icon of hor­ror, who, like Mojica, speaks no English, gets lost in trans­it between the air­port and the con, and winds up in a chil­dren’s play­ground unsuc­ces­fully try­ing to scare the kids.) And yet one was kind of impressed—if you’d seen any of his genu­inely sad­ist­ic films you’d kind of have to be. He really is one of the hand­ful of film­makers to whom the phrase “pulp sub­vers­ive­ness” genu­inely applies.

During a Q&A ses­sion with the man, I took a long shot. Mojica was based in Sao Paolo, the cynos­ure of a lot of polit­ic­al and aes­thet­ic rest­less­ness in Brazil in the ’60s; it’s where the “Tropicalia” school of Brazilian pop came out of. So I asked wheth­er his artist­ic under­ground had any kind of con­tact with the Tropicalistas.

Well, yes, as it turned out. In fact, Mojica averred, Caetano Veloso had pro­posed mar­riage to his wife Dede at the Sao Paolo première of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul. How romantic!

A few years back, Veloso pub­lished a memoir/history of him­self and trop­ic­al­ismo, the superb, knotty Tropical Truth. The book is more high-minded than most such remin­is­cences, as its pas­sage on Mojica attests:

In 1967, people were talk­ing about a Brazilian B movie [dir­ect­or and Cinema Novo pion­eer] Glauber Rocha had liked, [At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul], dir­ec­ted by the Paulista Jose Mojica Marins. In him Glauber sensed a prim­it­ive Nietzsche, although the pro­duc­tion was a hor­ror movie made on the sort of pre­cari­ous budget typ­ic­al of a small-town Brazilian cir­cus. The dir­ect­or went around wear­ing the same black cape and long nails of the char­ac­ter he had cre­ated in the film (and in oth­ers after­wards). Marins was—in every sense—popular. In the film, he both exposed our poverty and attacked the reli­gious con­ven­tions that were inim­ic­al to a bold indi­vidu­al will. The Catholic ima­gin­a­tion appeared mixed with the por­no­graphy of ter­ror, laugh­able visu­al effects, and dia­logues on the edge of street lan­guage. [Another friend] insisted it was pure charm on Glauber’s (and my) part to show aes­thet­ic interest in such a pile of trash. He did not believe I could see in the film a rad­ic­al ver­sion of what Glauber had tried to do in Land of Anguish. But it was truly dif­fi­cult, at the time, to admit to a crit­ic­al pos­ture that, soon after, would become commonplace. 

If this moves you to explore more Mojica, I gotta tell you, you might as well get the three-film Coffin Joe Trilogy box. Seeing just one of the pic­tures will not quite quell your dis­pos­i­tion to not believe the stuff actu­ally exists. Also, accord­ing to the imdb, Mojica’s just com­pleted a new Coffin Joe pic­ture, The Devil’s Reincarnation.