Wonderfully offbeat film!

People are voting emotionally.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul marks the debut of Brazilian director José Mojica Marins' cult character Zé do Caixão (AKA Coffin Joe), a sadistic undertaker who will go to any lengths to find a woman to bear his son (it's not easy to find a willing mate when you're a leering, sadistic creep in dire need of a stylist—those nails, that hat, the cape: they've just got to go!). To understand the film's importance in the annals of horror, one must put it into context: when it was originally released in 1964, the amoral nature of Marins' bizarre creation would have been extremely shocking to its native, largely Catholic audience—a truly disturbing villain who pushed the boundaries of taste.However, in today's cinematic climate, where blasphemy is no longer such a taboo, and violence has been pushed to extremes, At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul no longer possesses such an impact…As played by Marins, Zé comes across like a camp cape-swishing pantomime villain, more likely to elicit laughter than fear. His wanton behaviour is almost comical, as he proceeds to do whatever the hell he likes, raping and killing at will, the locals cowering in fear rather than forming a lynch mob and dealing with the fiend en masse, as they could so easily do. The film also features such trite spooky elements as a wizened old gypsy hag who warns Zé of his impending doom, a stuffed owl screeching from a tree, a raging thunderstorm, a foggy graveyard, and a ghost surrounded by badly animated glitter. One or two moments still hint at the power the film would have had on its original release—the brutal beating of Zé's friend's fiancée, Terenzinha, is surprisingly vicious, and the savage mutilation of a man's hand with a broken bottle was clearly explicit for the era—but there's almost nothing here to cause concern for modern day horror fans, making this one of interest only to cult movie addicts interested in seeing outdated oddities for the sake of completion.5/10 for making me laugh a bit.

You just can't pass Coffin Joe if you are a horror geek. Even as this flick is outdated it's a must see and you will understand that this was a real horror back in those days. It came before the classic The Night Of The Living Dead (1968) and I liked this one more then the over-hyped Romero flick. Maybe NoTLD still stand the time but here we do see a better use of the camera and the overall look was much more creepier. It even clocks in under 90 minutes which makes it excellent. The effects used are also worth checking out. Just see the poking of the eyes or one being drowned. It's filmed in black and white and that may turn geeks away or the aging may be a difficulty but it shows again that not all classics were made in the US. Being one of the first flicks shot by Coffin Joe it's indeed low on some parts he get well known for later but it definitely is a must see.Gore 1/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 3/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

This is the first film featuring the Brazilian horror icon Zé do Caixão (or Coffin Joe to most people). Its director and star José Mojica Marins brain-child and it is nothing if not a true original. In it, Marins evil character is a gravedigger who has the populace of a village in mortal fear of him. He seeks a woman to bear him a child and goes about this is a manner involving murder an mayhem.At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul is a very strange film. To some degree the weirdness may be attributable to its Brazilian origins. Marins output aside, there simply has been extremely few horror movies from this country. This means that the strange preoccupations on show here are isolated examples of horror from a Brazilian perspective. Hence the strange notion of an atheist horror villain who laughs in the face of god fearing villagers seems quite bizarre to western audiences but most probably had a lot more relevance within the context of the much more religious culture of Brazil. The upshot is that this character and these films are very strange indeed, and therefore are perfect fodder as cult movies. Even taking this into account though it would still have to be said that the story is often highly illogical and senseless. It has the feel of a comic-book in this sense. The people in Coffin Joe's world don't really act in a very normal way to say the least.For my money the sequel This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is a better film though. In that one Marins had a little more budget, several more ideas and a better understanding of pacing a film. As a result it is a better expression of the basic ideas first given voice here. Nevertheless, this remains a curious and bizarre item that's well worth checking out if you have a taste for the more idiosyncratic side of the movies.

In spite of the limited budget, amateurish acting and repulsive storyline, "At Midnight" is strangely refreshing. The director had neither the time, the money, or the talent to follow the conventions of more polished mainstream horror movies, so he just filled his available film stock with ugly images and raw emotion. You can call the resulting film boring (there are major pacing problems), disgusting (the protagonist kills, mutilates, and rapes the citizens of his town without any sign of remorse, and dares God and Satan to do anything about it) and badly acted (although most of the cast is at least not self conscious in front of the camera). And all of that is true. But there is something compelling in "At Midnight"), if only because that the movie doesn't (or can't) do things the way we in the U.S. have come to expect...and it's fun watching someone with different sensibilities put his obsessions on film. The other interesting thing about this film is that the protagonist has just the slightest unexpected bit depth to his character (at least for an amoral sociopath). His violent actions seem to be driven by his need to have a woman bear his child; his rants and speeches show him to be full of Promethean levels of hubris; and when his rape victim threatens to kill herself afterward, he counsels her that "Life is worth more than Death." You could almost say he is driven by a "rage to live". His comeuppance is strictly by the book ("The Little Golden Book Of Dramatic Foreshadowing") as the ghosts of the people he's killed come back to get him on the Day Of the Dead - but even this highly predictable sequence has a lot of energy to it and manages to be somewhat disturbing. Worth seeing once if it appears on cable TV or as part of a collection.