Country: BRAZIL
The brilliantly titled At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul is a very important horror film for a number of reasons. Firstly it marked the debut to feature filmmaking of actor/writer/director Jose Mojica Marins. Marins was able to create a very distinctive visual and thematic universe throughout his career and his preoccupation with exploring religion, poverty, and counter-culture would result in favourable comparisons to that other South American agent provocateur Alejandro Jodorowsky. The quest to bestow the status of auteur on Marins is fraught with difficulty however. His notorious departure into the realm of hardcore pornography in the hard up late 1970’s and 1980’s damages any attempt to romanticise his troubled career. But the films he made featuring the character Coffin Joe are unmistakably his and at least showed that when he had sufficient freedom and funding his world view was imperative to the proceedings.
