"Nothing's stronger than my disbelief! Destroy me! I have no faith!"

Not to hold it over your heads or anything, but I've been suffering hard for you mortals this week. I've been concentrating my research on the early 1960s to find you films so unusual they remain fresh to this day. I love Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, but it's as if they're in every movie. I've never even reviewed a movie with Barbara Steele in it, and I'm already sick of her. Every thing she's in, she goes to an old castle and there's a portrait of some 300-year-old witch that looks exactly like her.

Fuck Europe. Ever wonder what was going on in South America back then?

This week's Thursday Thriller is At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul.

Jose Mojica Marins wrote, directed and starred in this 1964 film in which he portrays Ze do Caixao, or to those who speak English, Coffin Joe. And of course Coffin Joe made this, the first Brazilian horror film. Look at the guy. He clearly did everything before it was cool!

Coffin Joe is the town mortician who looks like he probably vapes and knows how to ride a unicycle. Oh, and deep! Man, this guy can't wait to profess his atheism and how much smarter it makes him than everyone else. I mean sure, eat a leg of lamb on Holy Friday, but do you have to be such a douchebag about it?

In his top hat and bushy beard, you wouldn't be out of line if you assumed that he regularly hassles the bartender about which IPA has the most IBUs, but his behavior down at the public house is a little worse than that. 

One night after chopping off one guy's fingers with a broken wine bottle and beating another guy with a whip, Coffin Joe walks home and ponders his existential plight: essentially, that he needs a son to carry on his legacy, and life is pointless without one. His wife Lenita (Valeria Vasquez) can't bear him children, so he kills her by letting a tarantula bite her. He would like to conceive with Terezinha (Magda Mei), but she is engaged to his best friend Antonio (Nivaldo Lima), so he'll just have to die, too. Then he rapes Terezhina, who kills herself in shame. Pretty soon, you're thinking, man, this guy has made a lot of pissed off ghosts and probably collects Spoon bootlegs on vinyl. When will he get his bloody comeuppance?

You mortals know I hate to spoil movies, but I'll give you a hint. It's in the title. 

I joke about Coffin Joe, but At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul is a good movie, a welcome relief to the castle- and portrait-centric horror of the early 1960s. It streams on YouTube.