"Corpse" love

Almost imme­di­ately (in his­tor­ic­al time) after Robert Benayoun’s cita­tion of “authen­t­ic sad­ist­ic cinema” (in his 1960 essay “Zaroff; or, the prosper­it­ies of vice”) and a good two dec­ades before Nick Zedd’s rather less elo­quent “Cinema of Transgression” mani­festo, the Brazilian writer-actor-director José Mojica Marins grew his fin­ger­nails long and whipped out the char­ac­ter Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) for a few gal­van­ic films in which his act­ors, plucked from the slums of Sao Paolo, were com­pelled to enact the tor­tures of the damned in cir­cum­stances that did­n’t involve green screens or squibs. “Authentic” indeed. I’ve rumin­ated on Coffin Joe in these parts before, so I won’t reit­er­ate my theses here but merely point out that one of the most gal­van­ic of Marins’ ’60s films, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (Este Noite Encarnerei No Teu Cadáver) will be screen­ing this Thursday, August 14, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater at 9:30 p.m., with a live gui­tar score provided by my pal Gary Lucas, who recently worked son­ic won­ders with the Spanish-language ver­sion of Universal’s Dracula. More info on the event here. The film’s visit-to-hell sequence, the only col­or scene in this black-and-white film, is a par­tic­u­larly squirm-inducing high­light, an oozy bit of body-horror faux-psychedelia that expelled the entire aes­thet­ic of such out­fits as The Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black, from its pulsing brow. I ima­gine Gary’s found some genu­ine inspir­a­tion in these images and I very much look for­ward to see­ing and hearing. 

UPDATE: Because the film has an often prom­in­ent and pretty “far out” score of its own, com­posed by Herminio Gimenéz, Gary’s accom­pani­ment was even more of a high-wire act than usu­al, but the extra slath­er­ing of psych-rock and baroque motifs and carefully-carefree-with-that-axe sound effects the gui­tar­ist laid on over the film made it even more of a fant­ast­ic faux-nihilist trip on a pitch-black mid­night ship. As usu­al, there was no short­age of wit to Lucas’ music­al com­ment­ary, but more often than not his music was a deli­ciously dec­ad­ent dir­ect­ive not to beware of dark­ness but to sur­render to it, at least for just a little while. Awesome.