After being released from the hospital, and being absolved of murder, Ze do Caixao (Jose Mojica Marins) returns to his village. Right away six women go missing. People think that Ze is responsible, but they have no proof. In reality Ze did kidnap the women and is keeping them hostage. Ze is determined to find what he refers to as the “perfect” woman to bear him a son. He believes that children are special, and he wants to continue his legacy believing that immortality is in the blood. To help him, in his evil plan, he has a deformed hunchback named Bruno (Jose Lobo).
Ze tortures the girls by releasing spiders in their room, looking for one who exhibits no fear. One of the women, Marcia (Nadia Freitas) ignores the spiders. Ze believes she is a superior woman and worthy of bearing his child. He kills the other women while trying to make love to Marcia, but Marcia is upset at his cruelty. Ze no longer sees her as a superior woman. While they are dying one of the women curses Ze telling him he will never have the son he wants, and she will return to avenge her death. Ze ignores her words.
Not long after that Ze meets Laura (Tina Wohlers), the daughter of a local Colonel (Roque Rodrigues). Laura is immediately drawn to Ze. When the colonel’s son, Claudio, tries to interfere, Ze brutally murders him and frames the Colonel’s henchman, Truncador (Antonio Fracari). Laura moves in with Ze and abandons her family.
Ze begins to come unwound when he discovers that the woman who cursed him when she was dying was pregnant. The loss of the innocent child causes him to have a nightmare about being in hell. Ze meets the devil, who turns out to be himself. When Laura tells him she’s pregnant Ze is overjoyed believing his blood will be eternal and he is bringing about the perfect child. The Colonel and the townspeople have different ideas.
“This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse” AKA “Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver” was released in 1967 and was directed, written and stars Jose Majica Marins. It is a Brazilian horror film and was the second of three films Marins did with the character Coffin Joe or Ze do Caixao. The first film was “At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul” 1963 and the third film was “Embodiment of Evil” 2008.
The film picks up exactly where the first film left off except that in the first film it is intimated that the character Coffin Joe has died. In reality he just went blind and nuts for a while. This second offering is an oddly strange and sometimes disgusting horror film. At times it is surreal and at times disturbing but also long. At an hour and forty-eight minutes it went on longer than it probably should have. It seemed as if the story had ended up a string of little stories stuck together. At times it made the film a little hard to follow but it never stopped it from being a little disconcerting.
As in the first film, Marins has most of the dialogue. I suspect some of Coffin Joe’s narcissism is biographical. In one scene a woman is getting strangled by the boa constrictor. During the scene the constrictor really was cutting off her air, but everyone thought she was just a really good actress. Fortunately, the snake was stopped in time. When Ze is in hell the film switches from black and white to color. The scenes of hell are reminiscent of the nine circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno.