This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse is the sequel to At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul and the second installment of Coffin Joe’s adventures. Coffin Joe survives the events of the last film, and the police are unable to arrest him for the crimes he committed. So he begins again in his search for the perfect woman … one who might be worthy of carrying his son (who is apparently destined to be the future of humanity).

This Night I Possess Your Corpse features Joe’s philosophy, a hodge podge of beliefs that children are sacred, instinct is stronger than rationality, and God and religion are the superstitions of the weak and “inferior” races (who consist of everyone who isn’t Coffin Joe). To decide who shall be his bride, Joe kidnaps a group of women, and then releases tarantulas on them in their sleep. The one who doesn’t wake up screaming but inquisitively pets the spiders gets the job.

The wedding night involves the rest of the girls getting thrown in a pit next to Joe’s bed. The pit is then filled with poisonous snakes. Only things go awry when poor Joe learns one of the women he killed was pregnant, meaning he destroyed a child, “the most precious thing in the world”.

Racked with guilt, Joe begins hallucinating that the woman’s ghost is following him, repeating the phrase “This night I’ll possess your corpse.” In one ten-minute scene, the only one in color (and magnificent Technicolor at that), a corpse walks into his bedroom, drags him by the foot screaming out of his bed, down the stairs, out of the house, through the woods, and into the cemetery, where hands burst from the ground and literally drag him to hell.

Hell is full of color and the tormented versions of all the characters he has meet throughout the film. The Devil (whom Joe repeatedly insists he does not believe in) is a spitting image of himself, a mirror for all the suffering he has caused and refused to accept responsibility for. The film concludes in an atheist in a foxhole conversion scene, which is confounding (not to mention disappointing), but not completely out of place. Joe eventually wakes up and attempts to go about his creation of the master race, but the townspeople get wise and decide to pitchfork and torch his ass.

Though his terrors are largely hallucinatory, Joe continues rambling about “the superior man,” brow beating and hypnotizing people with his uni-brow, stroking his beard with freakishly long fingernails, or distributing the occasional bitch slap to a kidnapped women or village strong man.

Brazilian director Jose Marins’s series of avant-garde, no budget horror films, which he writes, and directs, and stars in, seems to reference no other films. He combines the styles of Ed Wood and Alejandro Jodorowsky, exuding complete confidence in his character. Coffin Joe is as iconic as Freddy, Jason, or Michael Myers.

The trip to hell is worth the price of admission alone. This is the second Marins film I’ve seen, and the first I could honestly recommend. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse is a film of irrepressible style that far outshines its obscure b-movie trappings.

Tags: coffin joe, joseph marins, this night I'll possess your corpse

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