The academic film critic Jeffrey Sconce has an essay called “Movies: A Century of Failure,” where he complains about the inability of trash genres like horror and sexploitation to live up to their own tawdry promise. When you come across a film called Nude For Satan (Sconce’s example) or Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy (a SyFy original picture I somehow conned myself into watching), you’d better keep moving. These things tend to have zero budget and even less ambition… and while cheap can be made to work, but there’s no correcting for lazy. Even when the filmmakers do make a genuine effort, how can the actual film, be it ever so gonzo, possibly live up to the outré dreamscapes promised by the title?
Actually, the production stills for this movie still look pretty awesome. Don't be fooled: it's shite.
Sconce is not being totally fair, here, and I wonder if he’s one of those writers who does not fundamentally enjoy the texts he makes his living discussing. But I do see where he’s coming from. I mean, Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy! The mind boggles. WHAT, is that COLON, doing THERE? When we learn what the film is actually about (some hooey about genetic engineering run amok), and what the titular man-shark hybrid actually looks like (insufficiently frenzied, I tell you what), it is kind of a letdown. Still worse, though, are the many scenes not featuring the shark: dull, bad, expository scenes, establishing important details about dull, bad, flat characters, all written, acted, and lit with the utmost level of bland professional competence. It’s just so normal. Answer me this, SyFy Original Pictures: if I wanted normal, if I was after normal, would I have ever sat down to watch a film with that title?
But I did not come here today to speak of Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy. I came to speak of another horror film, one of my favorite horror films — perhaps not the most fun to watch, perhaps not the most thought provoking, and certainly not the most professionally made, but a film which I cannot but watch whenever it is aired (roughly once a year around Holloween, thanks to the IFC network), and a film at which I cannot but smile whenever I am even reminded of its existence. This film of which I speak is called This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, and it is not one iota less balls-out nuts than that title would suggest. That is the highest praise I can offer it, and the most succinct summary.
A slightly less succinct summary would run as follows:
Meet Zé.
Zé lives in a small town in Brazil, where he works as an undertaker (earning him the name Zé do Caixão, usually translated in English as “Coffin Joe”). He wears a top hat and an opera cloak wherever he goes, and sports an impressive unibrow, protruding ears, and grotesque, clawlike fingernails. (And yes, those are the real fingernails of writer/director/star José Mojica Marins. He grew them out for the part over the course of several years, so Christian Bale and Robert DeNiro can pretty much suck it.) Other than cultivating his unique fashion sense, Zé has two related interests, the first of which is atheism and the second eugenics. These are not necessarily related, mind you, but for Zé they definitely are.
Because there is no afterlife, you see, men only live on after death through their children, or as Zé obsessively keeps putting it, through their “bloodline.” Therefore the only thing that matters in this life – more than your career, more than your friends, and certainly more than such piddling considerations as morals, laws, or basic human decency – is creating a genetically perfect offspring. And to do that, of course, Zé needs to find the perfect woman — this, incidentally, seems to have nothing to do with her chromosomes, but rather with her personality: she needs to be as coldly nihilistic as Zé himself. (Don’t ask me how that’s supposed to be passed down, man: first of all, I didn’t write it, and second Zé is obviously deranged.) This search for a breeding partner is Zé’s defining motivation across multiple films. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) is a sequel (cum remake – see below) of an earlier film called At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1963). Both are well worth watching, but Marins had a broader canvas to play with in Corpse, and unlike most directors he actually rises to the occasion. Marins made a third Zé do Caixão film, Embodiment of Evil, in 2008(?!), but I haven’t seen it, as it’s not yet widely available in the US. (I’m sure I could track it down if I tried, but part the charm of the Zé do Caixão films, for me, is their status as these inexplicable found objects that I stumble across while channel surfing late night TV. I’m sure I’ll stumble across Embodiment of Evil in due time.) In any case, judging from the trailer [warning: NSFW, and where are youtube’s censors on this one I wonder?], Zé is still up to the same old tricks.
In the first film, Zé murders his insufficiently perfect wife, Lenita, and then kills his best friend, Antonio, so he can get at his friend’s fiancé, Terezinha. When she turns him down, he rapes her. Rather than bear his “perfect” offspring, she hangs herself. Driven mad by guilt, and by what he sees as Terezinha’s betrayal, Zé slams down a bottle of rum, wanders out in the woods screaming half-baked atheist philosophy at the top of his lungs, and is visited by a parade of vengeful ghosts (which appear as a blurry negative print — kind of a neat effect). What with one thing and another, he ends up dangling upside down with his face torn off. The End. (No, I’m serious: that’s the last shot of the film.)
In the second film, Zé kidnaps an assortment of potentially perfect women, who he then puts through a series of tortuous “tests” in his elaborate basement laboratory, sort of like a horrific version of that ABC show The Bachelor. (More horrific, like.) Against all odds, Zé eventually finds not one but two women who fit his criteria and are willing, even eager to fulfill his loopy vision of immortality through better breeding, but one of them turns out to have flaws after all, and then she gets possessive, and the other eventually ends up miscarrying. Driven mad by guilt and by the failure of his elaborate plans, Zé has a nightmare where he is dragged out of his bed, bodily carried to a graveyard, and sucked down into hell (shot as a few minutes of garish technicolor in an otherwise black and white film — kind of a neat effect), screaming half-baked atheist philosophy the whole time. When he wakes, still deranged, he ends up wandering out to drown in the pond where he disposed of his victims’ bodies.
These plots are clearly riffs on the same formula, yes. But it’s not any recognizable formula. “Boy meets girl — Boy loses girl — Boy gets girl” is not in any immediate danger of losing its seat to “Horrific crimes — rant about the nonexistence of god — visually distinctive supernatural sequence — violent death.” There are a couple of obvious precursor texts, Don Giovanni being the big one, but Marins pretty much owns this narrative territory at this point. And if it’s a little clunky, it feels organic and personal in a way that a more polished Hollywood product would not. It’s like staying at a funky little bed and breakfast vs. staying at a Holiday Inn. Or, well… it’s like the difference between Zé do Caixão’s fingernails and Freddy Krueger’s glove. The glove is more artful and competent, but the fingernails are waaaaay creepier.
Startling, yeah?
But eff the plot. What draws me to these films, and keeps drawing me back, is not the narrative but the visual and philosophical sensibility. The color sequence in Corpse gets me every time, even now that I know it’s coming. (The first time I watched it, alone in my living room, I literally stood up in unconscious excitement like George II listening to the Hallelujah Chorus.) As for the philosophy, what attracts is not that it’s well thought out – because it’s not, nor does it really try to be – but that it’s deeply felt. How many horror films would make room for a soliloquy like this one? Delivered, mind you, by the writer/director himself, and in the high declamatory style. Imagine Brian Blessed.
Lenita! Antonio! Rodolfo! All dead. I did it for you, Terezinha. You’ve forsaken me. You didn’t give me a son. You’ve doomed my bloodline to extinction. I want a son! Damn you! Damn you! Curse your faith!
[Zé pauses, stares into the distance.]
Terezinha! Come out of nowhere. Punish the crime of my passion. Torture my flesh. Take my soul! Why don’t you come? You are a ghost from the past. Yet I feel my blood boiling in my veins. I am alive! Alive, do you hear? And you are dead. Rotted! Eaten by worms!
[Zé climbs up onto a coffin, and clings to the chandelier.]
Heaven! Hell! Reincarnation! The power of faith!
[Lets go of the chandelier, grabs a crucifix off the wall and brandishes it.]
O, symbol of ignorance! [Tosses the crucifix aside.] Where are you, Satan? Lies! Lies! May the earth crack open! The skies be torn! I want the end of the world!
[Grabs a bottle of wine and takes a healthy swig, spilling it all down his front, then chucks the bottle aside.]
I challenge your power! I deny your existence! Nothing exists but life! Nothing is stronger than my disbelief. Destroy me! I have no God. If he exists… I want proof! Liiiiiiiiiiiiies!
(The English translation of this last line is a paltry substitute in this case for the three-syllable Portuguese original: Meeeeeeen…..tiiiiiiiiiiiii…..raaaaaaas!)
I don’t know that Marins actually believes these words he’s putting in Zé’s mouth. Indeed, if anything the films point to Zé being wrong: in each case his nihilistic atheism is answered with supernatural retribution. And yet, and yet… One of the interesting things about the hell sequence in Corpse is that Zé is never actually tortured. He’s dragged down to hell, but then left to his own devices. Wandering around, he sees a variety of damned souls and demonic tormentors, and then Satan on his throne, laughing and watching the spectacle. Satan is played once again by José Mojica Marins. Now, remember, Zé do Caixão spent the first two thirds of this movie doing exactly this. Watching people be tortured is his idea of a good time, so the idea that he might get to do this forever should be good news. Instead, it provokes another chorus of “Meeeentiiiiiraaaaas!” Marins seems to me to be a person who keenly feels the absence of God, and rails against that absence. That’s a kind of disbelief, yes, but not atheism as it is generally understood, and certainly not what we get from Zé.
Ceci est BIEN SÛR un pipe!
So yeah, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse are wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful. This is not to say that they are perfect. The way that Zé behaves towards women is honestly gross, even for a horror film. Which is saying something. A couple of slight caveats are in order: first of all, Zé’s violence isn’t quite as single-mindedly misogynistic as the summaries above suggest. There’s a lot of man-on-man atrocities too – it’s just that they tend to be more or less incidental to the plot, so I left them out. Second, and more to the point, Marins has gone on record saying that Zé’s views on women are not his own. And I more or less believe him. And yet… as with the religious subtext it’s impossible to separate the director and the character completely. This is most evident in Marins’ signature “scare” images, which consist of shots of some sort of vermin – tarantulas, snakes, etc. – crawling around on the body of one of Zé’s victims. These sequences blur the line between reality and fiction in a fascinating way. Even in the most gruesome of the modern horror flicks (Saw, Hostel, et. al.), we know that the effects are just that: effects. The violence in Marins’ movies is similarly staged, and the sexual violence (each film that I’ve seen contains one rape) is only implied. But the animal shots? That’s a real spider walking around on a person’s real body. Just as the character is being tortured by Zé, so too the actress is being tortured by Marins. Of course, the actresses were all paid, had the option of walking off the set, and were not subsequently murdered, so we can’t take the metaphor too far… but we can safely say that these sequences flirt with becoming oddly sexless S&M porn. This doesn’t change the moral calculus — again, the actresses signed up for it, which makes all the difference. Furthermore, we don’t know how creepy they actually found the process. Some people (like me!) are terrified of spiders, others will handle them willingly. But there is something feverish and raw about these scenes. I feel uncomfortable and faintly ashamed when I observe them.
And what a powerful, rare, surprising reaction that is to a film! When I defend my affection for horror movies to people who are not fans, I often make some kind of noise about how the genre’s extremities (of emotion, of subject matter, of imagery) destabilize my general sense of what can and can’t be, and even more so what should and shouldn’t be, and therefore can take me out of myself. If that’s really the point, than Marins’ films succeed in the way that few others ever have. I suppose it’s a little unpractical to suggest that you all go out and watch one this Halloween, considering how hard they are to come by in the US… well, Soul is on Netflix, but not streaming so that’s too late anyhow. But the next time you’re up late channel surfing, if you happen to come across one of these a peculiar titles, you owe it to yourself to watch at least a few minutes. If nothing else, you can use them as a yardstick for just how disappointing Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy really is.