Encarnação do Demônio

• Marins ended a self-imposed drought to make it: Embodiment of Evil was his first horror feature in roughly three decades and the first Coffin Joe film in 40 years, co-written with Dennison Ramalho on a budget of R$1,800,000 and released in Brazil on August 8, 2008.
• It's the first film in the trilogy Marins shot with zero censorship breathing down his neck. The military regime had forced him to re-cut and re-dub the 1967 entry so Coffin Joe found God and repented; this time São Paulo was so on board that various levels of government appear in the closing credits, from thank-yous to full production credits.
• The gore is real where it counts. Scenes involving hooks, nails, intestines, severed lips and a freshly killed pig carcass were not staged, and the film unleashes roughly 3,000 live cockroaches along with rats, snakes, spiders and slugs. Effects were done by hand rather than CGI, with makeup by Brazilian artist Kapel Furman.
• Young Coffin Joe in the black-and-white flashback scenes is played by Raymond Castile, a Missouri journalist and horror host Marins cast in 2006. Castile went on to direct the tribute short The Blind Date of Coffin Joe, which won the 2009 Tabloid Witch Awards for Best Comedic Horror Short and Best Actor.
• It cleaned up at home before going abroad: at the July 2008 Paulinia Film Festival it won 7 of 15 categories and Marins took the Critics Choice award for best film. It then screened at the Venice International Film Festival 2008, where Marins showed up in full Coffin Joe costume.
• The plot picks up the literal cliffhanger of the 1967 film. A flashback confirms Zé survived submerging in the swamp at the end of This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, then served 40 years in a prison mental ward before his release.

The 40-year prison sentence is Marins writing his own career into the character. Coffin Joe sat caged for exactly as long as Marins sat unable to make a real Coffin Joe film under censorship and funding droughts, and the figure who walks out unrepentant into modern São Paulo is the director announcing he was never reformed either, just delayed.

The returning ghosts of past victims aren't supernatural punishment so much as the film's argument that Coffin Joe's philosophy finally costs him. The man who spent two films insisting the only afterlife is the blood that continues your name is now haunted by everyone he killed pursuing that bloodline, so the hauntings read as his own ideology turning on him in the one place he claimed nothing existed.

Read against the censored 1967 ending where authorities forced him to repent, this entry stages the bloodshed as defiance for its own sake. The relentless real-gore escalation, scalpings, hooks, live roaches, is less about the story than about Marins proving on camera that nobody can make this character kneel now, the uncut violence itself functioning as the apology he was once forced to fake.

Forty years in a prison asylum couldn't kill the bloodline obsession. Zé do Caixão walks free into a São Paulo he doesn't recognize, gathers a cult of degenerates in a slum hideout, and resumes his lifelong hunt for the one perfect woman to bear his superior son. Cops who tortured him want him dead, the ghosts of his victims won't leave him be, and the body count climbs through scalpings, hooks, and live insects. Marins closes the trilogy he started in 1964 the only way the character could end it: refusing, to the last, to repent.