The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe

• The Portuguese title, "Exorcismo Negro," translates to "Black Exorcism"; the film premiered in Brazil on December 23, 1974.
• It's the second of Marins' self-referential Coffin Joe films, following "The Awakening of the Beast" (1970) — a movie so provocative Brazil's military-dictatorship censors banned it outright for nearly 20 years. This follow-up plays noticeably tamer by comparison.
• In the opening scene, Marins appears as himself, insisting on camera that Coffin Joe is pure fiction — before the character manifests for real and threatens the family sheltering him.
• It is NOT part of the official Coffin Joe trilogy ("At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul," "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse," "Embodiment of Evil") — it's a separate, stand-alone meta-fiction entry in the character's filmography.
• Actress Wanda Kosmo plays Malvina, the witch whose decades-old bargain with a desperate mother sets the entire plot in motion.
• Distributors reportedly hired people to fake fainting and hysteria in theaters during the film's original run — a classic exploitation-era publicity stunt of the period.

The film is Marins' confession that Coffin Joe possessed him long ago, and the exorcism is genuine — but the priest is performing it on the wrong soul. Marins is the one who needs deliverance, and the film is his cry for help disguised as exploitation.

The metafictional structure is itself the blasphemy. By making the audience complicit in the staged ritual, Marins transforms every viewer into a participant in the black mass. The exorcism fails because the congregation — us — keeps watching.

The priest who arrives to intervene is the real protagonist, and the entire film is his test. Marins engineered the production specifically to tempt a man of faith into violence on camera, proving that religion's first instinct is the same as Coffin Joe's: domination.

José Mojica Marins opens the film as himself, staring down the camera to swear that Coffin Joe is nothing but a horror-movie invention — a character, not a curse. He should've kept his mouth shut. Marins heads out to spend Christmas with friends at a farmhouse, where the family's matriarch is still paying off an old debt: years back, a witch named Malvina helped her get pregnant, on the condition that Malvina got to pick who her daughter married. That daughter, Wilma, already has a fiancé she loves. Malvina had other plans — Eugenio, the son of Satan himself, and the bill's coming due whether the family likes it or not. One by one, the household starts turning, and Marins watches his "fictional" creation step off the screen to come collect. By the time the coven gathers for its diabolic wedding, torture and dismemberment on the menu, only an exorcism stands between this family and hell's in-laws. The man who insisted Coffin Joe wasn't real ends up the last line of defense against him.