Title – At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma)
Language – Portuguese
Genre – Horror, Slasher, Ghost
At Midnight I’ll take your soul is a Brazilian movie from 1964 and is the first of the ‘Coffin Joe’ Movies.
Ze do Caixao (Ze to his friends) is a grave digger in a small {Catholic} Brazilian town, he is violent, rude, self-important and blasphemous to the point of, not only eating lamb on a Friday but also forcing others to do so (It is against the Catholic religion to eat any meat on a Friday). The only thing Ze believes in it the continuation of his bloodline, unfortunately his wife, Lenita, cannot bear any children so Ze kills her, making it look like an accedent and starts perusing Terezinha, his best friends fiancée. The night before their wedding Terezinha, her fiancée Antonio and Ze go to a local witch to have their fortunes told, to make sure the wedding will be blessed. The Witch predicts Antonio’s death, suffering for Terezinha and tells Ze that he will pay for his sins.
Ze kills Antonio again making it look like an accident and tries to get Terezinha to fall in love with him, when this fails he rapes her in the hope that she will give him a son, instead Terezinha kills herself.
On the night of the festival of the ‘Day of the Dead’ Ze walks a young lady back to the house she is staying in, as no one else will due their superstition. On the way to her house they encounter the witch who tells Ze to return home, if he is out at midnight the dead will take his soul, Ze mocks her and continues on his way. As he returns home the witches warning starts to become reality.
The Character of Ze do Caixao well-acted as he swings from acts of violence to blasphemous, Satanic rambling whilst looking down on the rest of the town folk and then on to his questioning of belief and (possible) decent to madness and it is nice to find a ‘slasher’ who’s victims aren’t just the latest bunch of horny teens who happen to pick the wrong campsite or street to move into (although I am a fan of the normal Slasher films it is sometimes nice to find something slightly different). In some scenes Ze could almost have come out of a silent move or an old (Universal ) Horror with a lot of emphasis on his face. There a few scenes, normally when another character does something that annoys Ze when the camera focuses on his eyes and it looks like he is going to hypnotise the other character (like Dracula does) but nothing seems to happen and there is nothing that says that Ze has any type of supernatural power (maybe this is expanded on in the later films). There is not much to like about the character with his one redeeming feature being that he cannot stand crudity to children as he sees them as being the only real purpose for living
The effects in ‘At midnight I’ll take your soul’ are quite good for a film of its age, the scenes of violence are quite realistic but some of the supernatural bits are a bit dated (the owl is obviously stuffed), the film is also in black and white and not in English, points that don’t bother me but I know some people are a bit more fussy.
At midnight I’ll take your soul has some scenes of violence and does include (off Camera) rape and I get the impression that some of the latter films take this further and more graphic so not advisable for young children or people who don’t like that sort of thing.
