At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

• Marins bankrolled it himself by selling the family car and shipping his wife off to live with her parents, then charged his own acting students for the privilege of appearing on screen. He sold the finished film's rights to Ilídio Martins Simões (who plays Dr. Rodolfo) before the premiere just to claw back costs.
• He started shooting with 15 cans of negative stock. Two got stolen, leaving 13 to make a whole feature, and he shot almost entirely on indoor sets to control the shortage. With no lead actor available, Marins put on the cape himself and became Zé do Caixão.
• Coffin Joe was born from an actual nightmare: Marins dreamed a black-clad figure dragged him to a cemetery and threw him into an open grave, where the headstone carried his own name and his own death date. He realized the figure in black was himself, woke up, and ran to dictate the idea on the spot.
• Those claw fingernails started half real. Marins had kept his thumbnails long since boyhood; on this shoot the makeup man noticed and added fakes to the other fingers to finish the look. Marins liked it so much he later grew all ten out for himself over thirty-plus years, reaching nearly ten inches before he finally cut them in 1998.
• It's the first horror film ever produced in Brazil. Marins wrapped shooting about five months before the April 1964 military coup and released it that November, so the regime-allegory readings critics later hung on Coffin Joe came after the fact, not from the production.
• Synapse Films put out a 2017 DVD remastered from the 35mm negative under Marins' own supervision; Arrow later ran a 2022 4K restoration at the Cinecolor lab in Brazil, supervised by Marins' last producer Paulo Sacramento.

Zé do Caixão is the country's stand-in atheist standing trial. He eats meat on Good Friday, mocks every priest, and insists only blood and the flesh are real. The Day of the Dead climax doesn't refute him so much as drag him into the exact superstition he denied. The film lets you read it two ways at once: divine punishment for a heretic, or a guilty man's mind finally cracking under the weight of the people he killed.

The whole supernatural finale may be happening only behind his eyes. Every omen lands after the gypsy plants the prophecy and Terezinha lays the curse, so the cemetery ghosts can be read as his own conscience weaponizing the folklore he claimed not to believe. The horror is that a man who worshipped pure will can be destroyed by an idea he refuses to hold.

His obsession with the 'continuation of blood' reads as a man terrified of death dressing up as a man who scorns it. He needs a son not out of love but as proof he won't end. Every murder is him trying to outrun his own grave, which is exactly the grave from Marins' founding nightmare, and exactly where the film plants him at midnight.

In a dusty Brazilian backwater, undertaker Zé do Caixão sneers at God and worships one thing: the continuation of his own blood through a perfect son. When his wife Lenita can't give him one, he stages her death by spider, drowns his best friend Antônio, and takes the man's fiancée Terezinha by force. He eats meat on Good Friday just to spit at heaven. But a gypsy's prophecy and a dead woman's curse follow him to the cemetery, where the souls he buried come collecting on the Day of the Dead.