Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves

 

Robin Hood: Prince In Tights Of Thieves

Dir. Kevin Reynolds

Written by Pen Densham, John Watson

Starring Kevin Coster, Morgan Freeman, Mary Elizabeth Mastantonio, Alan Rickman

 

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES (or, RH:PoT, as the hip online kids of today call it) begins in a Jerusalem torture chamber. The first faces we see close-up are the filthy, sadistic (but helpfully English-speaking!) visages of the dungeon's torture/amputation division, as they ply their trade on the miserable Christian captives of the failed Third Crusades. In fact, even after we get a look at the hapless Englishmen, we may not realize that one of the men we are looking at is our protagonist, because he's dressed in soiled rags and sports a beard and mane that would make ZZ Top jealous. These are most assuredly not merry men. Short of starting with the slug line "The Dawn of Man," there isn't much more a film could do to convey to us in no uncertain terms that this aint yo' pappy's ROBIN HOOD. Unless you were born after 1991, in which case, it actually IS your pappy's ROBIN HOOD, canonized with a Mel Brooks parody, no less. 

In fact, I got the idea to watch this one when I reviewed ROBIN HOOD, MEN IN TIGHTS and dismissively suggested it might be funnier if you were familiar with PRINCE OF THIEVES, which I described as "a movie that no one on Earth has watched in nearly a half a century." Well, as you can imagine, it didn't even take a full minute after typing that sentence before I was overwhelmed with desire to remedy that situation. Which was an unexpected sensation for me, given that I had never previously regretted passing on this movie when it first came out and everyone agreed it was a drag. Indeed, the movie was roundly criticized at the time for being too dark and serious. Ebert called it "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," and went on to describe it as "gloomy" and Costner as "tortured." Vincent Canby called it "joyless" and slammed it for, um, "coming out firmly for civil rights, feminism, religious freedom, and economic opportunity for all" (apparently SJWs have been ruining all culture with their divisive politics since 1991 at least).

It was, in fact, arguably the origin --patient zero-- of the trend towards dark and gritty reboots which would become basically a full-blown cultural movement by the turn of the millennium. There were earlier cinematic* stirrings of this trend; John Boorman’s trippy, violent EXCALIBUR (1981) might be an example, and Tim Burton’s BATMAN from two years earlier comes even closer (especially in terms of how it was perceived at the time), but RH:PoT is much more beholden to some kind of faux-realistic affectation than either of those movies even pretended to be. People considered those films (and the following year’s BATMAN RETURNS), to be dark, but they’re certainly not “gritty,” which turns out to be a vital –although perhaps not quite as foundational as it might appear-- element of what would become the formula. “Gritty and realistic” remakes were not, of course, wholly unknown in 1991; Outlawvern commenter Pacman 2.0 noted the 1984 ‘this ain’t your daddy’s Tarzan’ adventure/drama GREYSTOKE, which definitely feels like it shares at least some DNA with PRINCE OF THEIVES in its self-conscious foregrounding of “gritty realism” within a pulpy premise. But it differs in that it represents an effort to return to the original (somewhat darker and more intellectual**) source material. PRINCE OF THEIVES has no definitive source material (the conception of “Robin Hood” and the related characters evolved slowly over centuries of poems, ballads and plays, all of which clearly arise from older folk traditions which predate the 15^th-century records which survive today), and so can’t claim fidelity to authoritative origins. Or to any kind of established history, for that matter, which perhaps explains why it feints towards “realism” only in a few highly selective ways, more as a signifier that it ought to be taken seriously than as an honest attempt to grapple with this subject in any kind of real world context (there’s a magical witch and a Bryan Adams song, among other distinctly fantastical elements).

The “realism,” then, is mostly a facade, though it would prove to be of defining aesthetic significance in the films that later adopted the same technique. Fundamentally, though, PRINCE OF THEIVES, like EXCALIBUR, Burton’s BATMAN films or the later Nolan/Snyder superhero films, is banking not on authenticity, but on surprise: its ability to shock a complacent audience by intentionally undermining expectations about a universally known icon which has grown so familiar as to feel “safe.” It is, like many of the “dark and gritty” reboots that would follow it, a movie that is deliberately confrontational towards an audiences’ presumed expectations about the subject matter. The entire raison d’etre is to say “hey kids, this isn’t the old, boring Robin Hood your parents like! This is the real Robin Hood, brash, uncompromised, uncowed, the one your square history teachers don’t want you to know about! He shares your dangerous, rebellious disaffection, scares your parents, and just might be too hot for polite society to handle!” (it’s worth noting that the production company, Morgan Creek, had previously enjoyed some in-retrospect-utterly-inexplicable success with its similarly irreverent semi-revisionist Western YOUNG GUNS).

It is this pugnacious attitude, based on shaking the comforting perceptions of nostalgic figures (many associated with childhood) that I think critics were responding to back then; it’s not that these films are necessarily “dark” compared to, say, other 1991 alumni like PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (or even TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY, which is indisputably more violent and intense). It’s that the film’s entire modus operandi has to do with subverting our expectations about deep-rooted cultural icons which have persevered so long as to feel centering and stable and perhaps somehow “pure,” untouched by the messy world of adulthood –but also static, abstract and unthreatening. Challenging that can be uncomfortable in some ways, which is, I think, what makes it potentially productive in others: I don’t know how culturally valuable it is to perpetually reimagine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so they stay fresh and vibrant for future generations, but one can at least dimly imagine some value in taking the tale of Robin Hood –with its fundamental fury at wealth inequality and wholehearted endorsement of revolutionary resistance—and shaking off the cobwebs a little, rescuing the tale from being a harmless fairy story rendered toothless by rote repetition and restoring its subversive bite. And locating it within a cinematic “reality” featuring distinctive signifiers that point to contemporary relevance –such as the “dark and gritty” aesthetic which, at least in 1991, was a cue to interpret the material as serious and hard-hitting, as opposed to the idealized, theatrical affectations most of the kids in 1991 would have associated with the corny old Robin Hood movies of the past—feels like a legitimate strategy to that end. But it is, ultimately, a strategy, not an end in itself. So while the critics –including myself!—often find it convenient to describe this and similar films as “dark and gritty,” they are really doing something rather different just underneath the surface. It’s just that to do so, something like ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES combines both the calculated “darkening” of material popularly perceived as frothy matinee stuff for kiddies (like we see in EXCALIBUR and the BATMANs) with the “realistic” “grittiness” of GREYSTOKE (or the next year’s revisionist UNFORGIVEN) to add some visceral weight and punch to a basic premise which had perhaps been dulled and diluted through rote repetition.

This would, of course, prove hugely influential as a technique, in many ways becoming a defining feature of the way studios thought about revitalizing old properties in the subsequent years (though the effect was not immediate – by 1995’s BATMAN FOREVER, the studio was deliberately trying to lighten things up, and it wasn’t until the ignominious failure of the glibly comic BATMAN & ROBIN in 1997 that the tide really started to turn. And even then, you had the cartoonish GODZILLA remake in 1998 and the old-fashioned corniness of THE MUMMY reboot in 1999). It obviously it struck some kind of chord at the time, though; the movie was a huge hit. But in1991, it sounded like a bunch of pretentious self-serious garbage to me, and I never bothered with it.

Imagine my surprise, then, to finally watch the movie and discover thirty years later that it is in fact a completely different kind of garbage! All that fretting about the gloomy, intellectual new Robin Hood was bunk, probably a response to the studio PR machine more than the movie itself. Far from being a broody, intellectual bore, RH:PoT turns out, in fact, to be a movie which is almost maniacal in its desire to entertain. You can almost hear the producers screaming "There should be witty banter in EVERY scene! And constant swashbuckling action! And raw sex appeal! And sweeping, expensive spectacle! But also relatable aw-shucks human drama! And for God's sake, can we get some sweeping, triumphant music in here?" Apparently this is what "dark and gritty" was like in 1991. It was a time of innocence.

But just because it’s not actually dark and gritty at all doesn’t mean it’s not a labored mess, it’s just a labored mess in a different way. A better way, I should stipulate; its earnest effort to create constantly entertaining big-screen spectacle is appreciated in this age of lazy, jokey 200-million dollar superhero sitcoms. Whatever it is, RH:PoT is absolutely never lazy. It was a fairly expensive production for its time,*** and man, every penny of that budget ended up on the screen. The movie is jam-packed with incident, setpieces characters, elaborate sets and costumes. Unfortunately therein lies the problem; it's so damned fanatical about constantly ingratiating itself in the moment that it loses track of the big picture. It's a movie where fun stuff is constantly happening (fight scenes, evil monologues, Kevin Coster swimming in the buff, bonding, fighting, comedy, pathos) but the story never seems to build any momentum.

Or, perhaps, it spends far too much time trying to build momentum. Like many of its “dark and gritty” descendants (striking so, in fact, another way in which the movie proves shockingly prescient, even prophetic, about the shape of Hollywood franchises to come), it is cripplingly obsessed with the hero’s origins (a disastrous trend for narrative film, which would be kicked into overdrive with the STARS WARS prequel trilogy in 1999, but—crucially-- is all-but-absent from BATMAN). Hence, the torture-chamber opening; where previous Robin Hood films simply presented the familiar character fully-formed, PRINCE OF THEIVES wants to meticulously chart the course of how the character came by all his iconic trappings, from the bow to the Merry Men to the name. This takes quite a bit of time and exposition to accomplish, and even if much of it is solidly entertaining it seriously challenges the point of making a movie about Robin Hood, if for much of the runtime our hero is not yet recognizable as that character. “Robin of Locksley” doesn't become "Robin Hood" proper until well past the halfway point, and “Becoming Robin Hood” and “Doing Robin Hood Stuff” are two different story arcs which feel noticeably separate, related but not comfortably contiguous. The movie is burdened with so much backstory that once the pieces are finally in place, everything feels weirdly rushed, with the whole Hood-Nottingham conflict crammed into two huge setpieces in the movie’s back half and never given the chance to breath. When the big climax turns up (nearly 2 hours into a merciless 143 minutes**** -- apparently egregiously bloated runtimes for blockbusters are not wholly an artifact of 21st-century Hollywood) it still feels narratively too soon, like they already did a whole movie and then tried to cram its sequel into 50 minutes at the end. 

Still, credit where it's due: fun stuff is constantly happening. Even aside from the impressive action and production, it’s a hugely entertaining cast. Alan Rickman, as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham (no Prince John here, which probably saves us a good 40 extra minutes of screentime, though at something of a cost to the story's central conflict), goes absolutely all-out mega-acting, to richly entertaining effect, and most of the rest of the cast is able to meet him at least halfway, leaning into the larger-than-life broadness of their characters. Costner makes for a notable exception; his decision to play the title character as a humble, intellectual man of action was the subject of bitter criticism when the movie premiered (with many critics comparing him unfavorably to Errol Flynn's breezy, swashbuckling take, which they apparently considered definitive). But today it seems like the obvious right choice, leaning into the actor's folksy everyman charm and allowing him to operate as the solid hub of a rather unwieldly and eccentric wheel. It's a little silly that he doesn't even take a swing at a British accent, (even Christian Slater at least tries. Or at least, I think that's what he's doing) but hell, it's a silly movie. Robin seems to become a hero because he has a nearly inhuman ability to find things to swing from in virtually any situation, like a 12th-century Spider-Man. If you can enjoy that, I don't think we really need to worry too much about the accent.

And I hope you do enjoy that, because swinging on things is very much the movie's idea of excitement. Which makes it kind of amazing that this friendly, silly, eager-to-please mainstream blockbuster was taken so seriously at the time. Despite its foundational role in the creation of the gritty, serious, realistic reboot… when you come down to it, it's hardly any of those things at all! There's, like, three nut-shots in the first half-hour. Costner and Freeman banter like Riggs and Murtaugh! Friar Tuck breaks the fourth wall! There's an out-of-the-blue cameo in the last 30 seconds! There's a huge fiery explosion that Coster has to strut away from without looking back, for Christ's sake! And I mean, it's cool enough when guys do that in modern movies where shit is exploding all the time; when the fuck is this dude in the 12th century ever gonna see anything that cool again? So double badass, there. 

Basically, I think the movie is a bit misunderstood. It's not so much an attempt to make things more realistic as it is an attempt to add a different texture to a familiar story, teasing a few new threads of meaning out of it, but mostly just having fun doodling in the margins with whatever the filmmakers thought might be cool. 

Obviously I'm in favor of that, and would like to correct the record on 1991's behalf. But if the movie is misunderstood or misremembered, I also can't necessarily say it's underrated. Like anyone trying too hard, it's not all that consistent, and a little exhausting to put up with. But it’s interesting that this fact is not what history has held against it – for better or worse, the movie, if it is remembered at all, is remembered for its pioneering, boundary-pushing “dark and gritty” approach. The fact that it self-evidently isn't either didn't matter, apparently; that was what people remembered about it anyway. Of Ebert’s complaints that the movie is "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," the only one which is even a little true is “unfocused.” But in the movie world, perception is reality, and obviously even the timid gestures the movie makes in that direction felt significant enough to the contemporary audience to be hugely impactful – not just on the way they viewed the film, but as a potential lens to view any proposed remake or reboot. It is, I think, no coincidence at all that in 2010, we got another Robin Hood movie (this one directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russel Crowe) which leaned even harder in the direction of a “dark and gritty” origin story. After all, by that point, RH:PoT very much was your pappy’s Robin Hood – and the problem with its basic strategy is that it is by definition it loses its zest as it ceases to be surprising. And of course, you can only get so dark and gritty before the whole approach loses its impact. The next ROBIN HOOD, in 2018, took a wholly different approach, trying to mimic a very different set of aesthetic signifiers: those of the modern comic book blockbuster. All of which leaves poor PRINCE OF THEIVES as an orphaned relic of a bygone era, which blazed bright for a brief moment, and perhaps had a significant influence on the direction pop culture took in the subsequent years, but has as an independent work of art sunk into relative obscurity, even suffering the indignity of being eclipsed in the popular consciousness by its own parody, which is today almost certainly more frequently watched and better remembered.

But at least I respect its hustle. If more movies had tried to imitate that, rather than its alleged gritty realness, blockbuster history might have been shaped for the better. But oh well, at least we'll always have the merchandise. 

And, I'm sorry to remind you, a truly dire Bryan Adams song. 

 

 

* Comic books had been going in this direction for some time, since at least Frank Miller’s 1986 sweaty, fascistic grimdark The Dark Knight Returns. By the 1990’s, gritty anti-heroes like Venom and Spawn would be the rule, rather than the exception. But movies were slower to follow, flirting with the florid nihilism of comic books throughout the 90s but struggling with how –or if—to translate that energy to the big screen.

** Or so I’m told. It’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, so I feel like there’s probably a limit on how “dark and intellectual” it could be, but the consensus seems to be that GREYSTOKE is, in both tone and substance, much more faithful to the source material than previous adaptations had been. I’ll have to take their word for it since there’s no way in hell I’m reading 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes. Right? I mean, of all the things in the world to read, why would I read that? I mean, I guess, it probably would be interesting as a cultural artifact. And it’s probably pretty short. Oh shit, should I read 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes? It does sound like the kind of thing I would do, now that I see it in written out in black and white.

*** Though at $48 million, hardly record-breaking; 1989’s BATMAN had cost only a little less, and TERMINTATOR 2 cost twice as much. Only a scant four years later, Costner’s own WATERWORLD would cost $172 million.

**** And there’s also a 155-minute “extended edition,” which apparently contains even more exposition about whatever supernatural conspiracy the Sheriff of Nottingham is on about.

 

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (aka Coffin Joe) and the great mid-century worldwide horror wave

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul aka Coffin Joe aka À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma (1964)

Dir. José Mojica Marins

Written by Waldomiro França, José Mojica Marins, Magda Mei

Starring José Mojica Marins, Magda Mei, Nivaldo Lima, Valéria Vasquez

Brazil is not necessarily the first country you think of when you think of horror cinema. There are a smattering of horror movies shot in Brazil (everything from KILLER FISH [1979] to TOURISTAS [2006]) but these are mostly foreign productions, maybe incorporating a local film partner but more often just slinking in to shoot some rainforest footage and maybe a few impoverished-looking villagers before returning home, undoubtedly to become really annoying at parties talking about how exotic their travel has been.

In recent years, it looks like Brazil has gotten more into the horror game, with some modern titles like BEYOND THE GRAVE (2010), DESAPARECIDOS( 2011), THE NIGHT OF THE CHUPACABRAS (2011), DARK SEA (2013), THE FOSTERING (2015), and the nifty-sound THE BLACK FABLES (2014), several of which seem to be directed by former magician Rodrigo Aragã, now on my list of international heroes. But as near as I can tell, until fairly deep into the new millennium, Brazilian horror was almost totally the province of one man, writer/director/star José Mojica Marins, and, indeed, one character: the diabolical (but dapper!) undertaker Zé do Caixão, which is usually rendered in English as Coffin Joe.

Joe (every bit of English language commentary refers to him by his Anglicized name, so I’ll follow suit) is a pretty unique character. He’s a bearded mortician who -- though he lives in modern times -- dresses in an extremely old-fashioned formal style, complete with cape and top hat. His clothes and his disturbingly long, curled fingernails give him a decidedly vampiric appearance, but there’s nothing supernatural about him, except the fact that he’s just the world’s biggest fucking asshole, to everyone, everywhere, like Dr. House if he didn’t cure your Lupus. Instead of a fantastical creature, he’s something even more terrifying: an atheist! Indeed, his supreme assholishness is in part a reflection of how superior he feels to all the superstitious ninnies around him!* His real obsession, though, isn’t philosophical but biological. He arrogantly considers himself far better than the common man, and this manifests in an obsession to father a son with the “perfect woman,” a goal he describes (with the feverish zeal of a madman) as “continuity of blood.” This makes for an interesting motive for a horror antagonist (or at least a uniquely unsavory one) and gives the whole affair a subtle structure of hubris and punishment. All well and good, but practically speaking as the movie plays out, the main attraction is him just going around being an unbelievable asshole to everyone he meets, and occasionally flipping out, getting weird bloodshot eyes, and slapping people around. Which it turns out is more than enough to add up to a good time at the movies.

AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL marked the arrival of Brazil’s most famous horror icon (I spoke with several native Brazilians for this story, who confirm that “Coffin Joe” is every bit the national institution in Brazil that Freddy or Jason are in America), but more broadly it also inaugurated the entire horror genre in the country, as Brazil’s very first horror film of any kind. 1964 was a little late for a first entry into the horror game (Mexico, for example, had been making horror movies since at least El fantasma del convento In 1934, and had spent the 50’s cranking out increasingly sophisticated horror tales ranging from the trailblazing El vampiro to the batty brain-eating sci-fi El Barón del terror --better known in the US as THE BRAINIAC), and, perhaps consequently, AT MIDNIGHT has something of a dated feel, even for a 1964 movie. It looks fairly handsome in its scrappy black and white, but there’s no getting around the fact that it also feels a bit stilted and old-fashioned, and despite some stylish touches (Joe’s weird apartment sports a nest of hands sticking out of the walls! A ghostly sequence at the end gets nigh-on psychedelic by inversing the standard black-and-white contrast!) it was obviously made on the cheap. But it doesn’t matter at all, because Joe --as embodied by director José Mojica Marins-- is just such a wonderfully hateable and imminently watchable screen villain. Marins claims the character and his affectations came to him in a dream, and frankly I believe it, because it’s hard to articulate just what makes him so loathsomely compelling, but there’s equally no denying it. Something about his haughty demeanor, anachronistic dress, and single-minded sadism is instantly iconic and timeless in a way which feels genuinely subconscious.  

The film is smart to just go ahead make him the central character, because, admittedly, he’s the only interesting thing around. I think a less confident (or less crazy) director might have chickened out and larded up the film with some dull good guy characters we have to pretend to care about, but Marins seems to have almost immediately realized the vein of gold he’d struck, and just contents himself to let Joe run amok. It’s not an especially narrative film, mostly being composed of little vignettes of Joe wandering around treating people like shit and sometimes flipping out on them. Any plot that materializes is simply built upon him just getting more and more outrageous until finally he gets his comeuppance. That’s not to say the film is wholly without structure, though; the finale, where his misdeeds finally catch up with him, is a righteous, old-fashioned nightmare, a well-paced and compelling bit of gothic horror ghost show (though perhaps a little conventional compared to the bracing strangeness of the rest of the film.) It’s a worthy horror climax, but the real showpiece scene is actually halfway through, as Joe reflects --maybe even a little sadly-- on his misdeeds, and dares the universe to do something about it in a heroic bout of mega-acting that the camera is too mesmerized by to cut away from. Dated and cheap as the film sometimes is, Marins proves himself an able horror director when he wants to be (particularly with the feverish, atmospheric climax) but this lengthy monologue firmly demonstrates that the lightning in a bottle here is the character himself, with all his unexpected contradictions and mysteriously compelling odiousness.

AT MIDNIGHT is by no means an overwhelmingly violent or salacious film, but still, it had to be pretty shocking for a first-ever horror film in Brazil. You got some fingers cut off, some maggot-strewn bodies, a hanging body, and a drowning scene better than any in THE DROWNSMAN, which is honestly about as shocking as any comparable Hammer or Italian film dared to get at the time. One word of warning: Given his obsession with fathering a son, it probably comes as little surprise to you that consent is not high on his list of Joe’s priorities, and of course that goes exactly where you think it will. The rape scene is probably a little harder for modern audiences to deal with than it would have been in 1964, and I’d certainly understand if it was a dealbreaker for some people who still retain some modicum of human decency. Those days are a distant memory for me by this point, but even I can’t deny that it makes things a little less fun afterwards. At any rate, the worst stuff happens off-camera, and hopefully the whole enterprise is dated and silly enough that it won’t kill the buzz for you, because otherwise Joe’s gleeful sadism is mostly a hoot, over-the-top in a gratuitously delightful EVIL DEAD sort of way instead of a grim torture-porn kinda way. Still, it’s obviously very much a movie of its time, with all that implies about early 60’s Brazilian society and social standards.

In fact, AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL seems to have arrived right on the crest of something of a global wave of horror, which began in the late 50’s and peaked in the early 60s, continuing onward in some countries and rolling back in others. Like Mexico, some of these individual cultures had flirted with horror cinema in the early days of film, but had backed away during the long nightmare that was the two world wars. Japan, for example, was making silent horror films as early as 1898, in Bake Jizo and Shinin no Sosei. But it was only with the advent of the the 1950s that they returned to the genre with films like TALES OF UGETSU (1953) and THE GHOST OF YOTSUYA (1959), -- not to mention GODZILLA (1954). While these stories have origins much older than their cinematic representations (THE GHOST OF YOTSUYA is based on a classic Kabuki play first performed in 1826!) there seems to have been something about the 1950’s which ushered them into cinemas around the world in a more persistent and impelling way. In England, of course, Hammer was gearing up for what would become a historic horror renaissance beginning with THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT in 1955 and coming into its own with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE HORROR OF DRACULA in 1957 and 1958, respectively. And In Italy, Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava inaugurated modern Italian horror with I VAMPIRI in 1957 and the Sci-Fi/horror CALTIKI in 1959, though of course it would be Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY (1960) which ignited a wave of Italian Gothic horror that lasted throughout the 60’s and into the giallo era of the late 60’s and 70’s.

What was it about the late 50’s and early 60’s which provoked this deluge of horror cinema around the world? The usual hacky answer is Cold-War-era nuclear malaise, a paranoid fatalism about the potential destruction of human life on Earth which percolated deep into the collective unconsciousness of the world and manifested as a generalized anxiety which found expression in newly visceral horror cinema. While I have always contended that this argument is overstated (most specimens of the “nuclear monster” era of sci-fi horror which, in particular, dominated American genre cinema, are simply too corny and cheerful to realistically read as documents of an unsettled national psyche), it’s also not wholly unwarranted, as we can see from the genuinely bleak tone of early films like THEM! and, perhaps most obviously, the original GODZILLA.

Four films from the worldwide wave of horror cinema which kicked off in the mid-50's: Italy's I VAMPIRI (1957), England's DRACULA (1958), Japan's THE GHOST OF YOTSUYA (1959), Mexico's EL VAMPIRO (1957)

Still, I’m more inclined towards the theory advanced both by Mikel J. Koven in his book on Italian giallo cinema La Dolce Morte and Colette Balmain in her Introduction to Japanese Horror Film: the anxieties which provoked such a startling worldwide avalanche of horror cinema have less to do with geopolitics and more with rapidly shifting cultural norms. Particularly as traditionally patriarchal and rigidly classist societies --like Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Japan and, as we shall see, Brazil-- saw radically new roles for women emerge, just as the traditional sources of social power began to visibly fade and crumble (the aristocracy in England, Confuciust-based monarchy in Japan, the Roman Catholic church in Italy and Mexico, and the civilian government of Brazil). Though in many ways this was a direct result of the chaos wrought upon these societies by World War II, these social shifts were somewhat more gradual, which I suspect contributed to a long-term sense of slow-motion national collapse, something palpable enough to inflict real psychological trauma, but gradual enough to seem amorphous and nonspecific, exactly the sort of environment wherein the abstracted and symbolic terrors of horror cinema would be expected to thrive. Note that in the US -- largely unscathed and in many ways empowered by the second World War-- these anxieties would manifest themselves somewhat later, as the culture shock of the late 60’s finally hit the mainstream with its own shifting ideas about class, feminism, equal rights, and the counterculture, embodied most directly in some of the “Killer Hippie” and “Youth Gone Wild” exploitation films of the late 60’s (for example, I DRINK YOUR BLOOD in 1970) but also clearly visible in everything from the nihilistic visions of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE to the arguably reactionary sexual politics of the 80’s slasher wave.

In Brazil, 1964 was a particularly turbulent year. In March, a long-gestating Military coup d'état (supported, predictably, by the US) had seized control of the government and deposed president João Goulart, following several years of tumultuous leftist reforms and economic instability. By the time AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL premiered in November, the country had entered into what would become a decades-long nightmare of repressive military rule, under which intense privatization efforts handed vast sections of the economy over to foreign corporations, economic inequality skyrocketed, and thousands of Brazilian artists, intellectuals, and dissidents were deported, imprisoned, tortured or murdered. Seen in this light, the imperious, amoral and curiously anachronistic Coffin Joe character makes a certain amount of sense, as the personification of the newly emboldened ultra-right wing military dictatorship, with its casual sadism and total lack of compassion (that having been said, his strident atheism is interesting in this context; the Catholic church was initially divided between progressive and reactionary elements during the coup and the subsequent military dictatorship. It seems, however, that the initial reaction by the mainstream church power structure was at least moderately pro-military, which would make sense given the traditional enmity between the Catholic church and the generally secular-leaning left-wing forces. Ultimately, the church would play a key role in protesting and organizing resistance to the dictatorship, but I’m not at all certain that would have been apparent just a few short months into the new government’s rule. Hence, I take Joe’s atheism as something of a separate issue, and more along the lines of the generalized anxieties about shifting social institutions which we can also see in the other countries discussed above.)

These are not images from the movie, but historical photos from the '64 coup, which began April 1. The movie does not reference this directly, but does it do so symbolically?

Alternatively, Joe’s anarchic lashing out and rigid personal code might have been read as the calling card of a cathartic anti-hero, a rebellious personification of fierce individualism in the face of an increasingly repressive government and society. Certainly, that’s how the military itself read the films, banning or severely censoring several of them (Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies By Dana Och, Kirsten Strayer, pg. 151), including AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL (which probably worked to Marins’ benefit, lending the films an even more controversial, cult appeal). Like any great horror icon, I doubt Coffin Joe could have remained so universally beloved for so long if he was merely seen as an utterly despicable figure, so as tempting as it might be to suggest that his imperious sadism is an easy parallel for a inflexible, dictatorial government, the evidence seems strong that audiences saw at least something they related to in the character. Even though Joe is clearly a villain, he defies easy categorization and and pat symbolic interpretation. Indeed, according to a lengthy and (to all appearances) fairly well-researched article by Christoph Huber in CinemaScope, it may in fact be Joe’s very elusive metaphorical nature which has contributed to enduring iconic status. He writes:

With Zé do Caixão, Mojica managed to create a vessel able to contain many of the antagonisms and ambivalences of Brazilian society. This indefatigable, nefarious, but also deeply honest seeker of immortality through a perfect bloodline (and the appropriate woman to bear his superior spawn) immediately became a hero of the poor and underprivileged, who undoubtedly responded to his liberating, anarchic anger against a hypocritical establishment—church, politics, and police inevitably form a corrupt trifecta of institutionalized evil challenged by Zé. Yet the black-clad gravedigger with his trademark accessories (top hat, cape, and those long, long nails) also is a frustrating force himself, stifling a timid society, which he punishes with contempt for its weakness. As the aptly schizophrenic words of the catchy gospel ballad over the opening credits of Mojica’s horror anthology The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968) have it: “His reign is for revolt/His orders are for hatred.”

Anyway, whatever his original intention (if, indeed, there was ever anything as disappointingly banal as a “point” in the mind of his creator) having single-handedly invented Brazilian horror, Marins quickly set off on that most honorable pursuit of a horror director: milking the franchise for all it was worth for decades until the whole thing was totally run into the ground (Disney is no doubt eagerly consulting Marins even now for new techniques to render STAR WARS so utterly ubiquitous as to be functionally meaningless). Marins went on to make other horror and exploitation movies, but since his ‘64 debut, Coffin Joe has consistently shown up all over the place in Brazilian pop culture, both in an official trilogy of films (beginning with AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL, continuing into its direct sequel THIS NIGHT I’LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE in 1967 and concluding an impressive 40 years later with EMBODIMENT OF EVIL in 2008), and in various noncanonical films and cultural bric-a-brac, including supporting roles in AWAKENING OF THE BEAST (1970), THE BLOODY EXORCISM OF COFFIN JOE (1974), and HALLUCINATIONS OF A DERANGED MIND (1978). He was such a draw that they even used his name in a film he doesn’t even appear in, the anthology THE STRANGE WORLD OF COFFIN JOE (1968) (presumably one strange thing about Coffin Joe’s world is that he doesn’t always turn up in the films that literally have his name in the title). And get this -- those are just the films that Marins himself directed. Marins and Joe have also shown up as TV hosts (including in-character in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents style horror anthology series called Além, Muito Além do Além (Beyond, Much Beyond the Beyond) which ran 1967-1988, and later a similar program called Um Show do Outro Mundo (The Show from the Other World).

Scene from the 2008 horror/comedy short THE BLIND DATE OF COFFIN JOE.

Coffin Joe has also shown up in a series of comic books (because, of course), in TV comedies and soap operas, in commericals (including, improbably, for a 1969-70 Volkswagen model actually called the “Zé do Caixão,” which, yes, is a real thing), and, in lyrics and music videos for everything from iconic Brazilian art-pop band Os Mutantes’s classic 1968 debut album to Brazilian metal stalwarts Sepultura’s 1996 classic Ratamahatta on their album Roots (Marins, in full Joe regalia, even joined the band onstage on at least one occasion to perform what wikipedia describes as “an on-stage ‘blessing’”). Ohioan death metal band Necrophagia also sports a Joe-themed song on their 2003 album The Divine Art of Torture (the cover of which also bears an image of the fiendish mortician) which is both named for the character (using his original Brazilian name Zé do Caixão, because Necrophagia absolutely does not fuck around a single bit) and, purportedly, features lyrics which recount the plot of AT MIDNIGHT I’LL TAKE YOUR SOUL.** And do I really need to tell you that White Zombie sampled the opening of AWAKENING OF THE BEAST in their song I, Zombie? Frankly it’s far less surprising that Joe is sampled in a Rob Zombie song than it is that is that Rob Zombie hasn’t (yet) found a good cameo role for Marins in any of his movies. But you know it’s coming.

Anyway, Marins is 80 now, but age doesn’t seem to be slowing him down yet: IMBD reports he’s currently filming yet another iteration on his classic character in the not-yet-completed but excellently named Brazilian horror/comedy MOSQUITOID. And lest you forget: he created, wrote, directed, and first starred as the character in 1964. That’s 52 years of Coffin Joe. Is there any other actor who has portrayed an iconic character so successfully for so long? The closest I could think of was Angus Scrimm, who played the Tall Man from PHANTASM, on and off, from 1973-2016 (his death), but still a full decade short of Marins. Other contenders fell even shorter; Boris Karloff actually only played his iconic role as Frankenstein’s monster from 1931-1939, though he would don the makeup again one final time in 1962 for an episode of the TV series Route 66, making his total 31 years, just missing Bruce Campbell’s tenure as EVIL DEAD’s Ashley Williams, which currently stands at 35 years. Anthony Perkins played Norman Bates from 1960-1990, across four sequels in 30 years; by contrast, Brad Dourif has been Chucky for 25 years, Robert Englund has been playing Freddy Krueger for a mere 21 years (including his 2005 appearance in the Freddy-themed game show series A Nightmare on Elm Street: Real Nightmares), and Doug Bradley played Pinhead for a paltry 18 years. Other iconic characters, like Jason Vorhees, Leatherface, or Michael Myers, have been played by a rotating roster of actors. So as near as I can tell, Marins is actually the longest-running cinematic horror icon in film history. Since I’ve only seen the first one (so far) I can’t report on how consistent the results have been over his half-century of Coffin Joe, but even from the start, it’s obvious there’s something uniquely special here. To carry it on so successfully and with such startling longevity is a genuinely stunning feat. Continuity of blood indeed.

(Special thanks to Mauricio Carvalho for offering a Brazilian's perspective on the Coffin Joe phenomenon!)

*Great, another completely despicable horror icon who I immediately relate to. Thank God for all the rapey stuff that happens later, because otherwise this was shaping up to be another REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN situation where I spend the whole movie grousing that the “villain” is actually completely right.

** These are death metal lyrics, so for all you can actually understand he might as well be singing about the Keebler elves. But according to darklyrics.com the lyrics are pretty spot on:

Spits in the face of god

Cast an inverted shadow

(Talons of) deprovation [sic] adorn

Bloodshot eyes

Dead as night

Ze Do Caixao

Unholy desires

A torture garden

Inside his soul

His ways are sadistic

In his quest for destiny

Womb of innocence

Defiled with his seed

Spawning a superior race

A bloodline of blasphemy

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

TAGLINE	None apparent
LITERARY ADAPTATION	None
SEQUEL	Followed by two more official sequels, THIS NIGHT I’LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE in 1967 and EMBODIMENT OF EVIL in 2008. He also features in various supporting roles in AWAKENING OF THE BEAST (1970), THE BLOODY EXORCISM OF COFFIN JOE (1974), and HALLUCINATIONS OF A DERANGED MIND (1978), and has appeared in other media as well (see above)
REMAKE	None
DEADLY IMPORT FROM:	Brazil
FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK	No
SLUMMING A-LISTER	None.
BELOVED HORROR ICON	José Mojica Marins / Coffin Joe
NUDITY?	No.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes, although it’s mercifully off-screen
GORE?	Not much out-and-out gore, though a finger does get cut off
HAUNTED HOUSE?	No
MONSTER?	No, just the monster of Man’s hubris.
UNDEAD?	Ghosts!
POSSESSION?	No.
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
SLASHER/GIALLO?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yeah, for reasons which are never made clear, when Joe really gets mad he gets these crazy bloodshot eyes.
VOYEURISM?	No, not really

OBSCURITY LEVEL	Very well-known in its native land, to the point of being ubiquitous and iconic. Less so elsewhere in the world.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Just because we all love Slash does not mean everyone with an iconic top hat is good people.
TITLE ACCURACY	Actually both titles (AT MIDNIGHT and COFFIN JOE) are both pretty accurate, but a word of note: Joe doesn’t take anyone’s soul, and is in fact the one who is being addressed in the original title, not the one saying it.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE?	N/A