At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

José Mojica Marins created Zé do Caixão, Coffin Joe: an undertaker in a top hat with long fingernails who terrorises a small town looking for a woman worthy of bearing his son.

He is a militant atheist who eats meat on Good Friday and lectures the townspeople about the continuity of blood, which in Brazil in 1964, under a new military dictatorship and heavy censorship, was genuinely provocative.

Marins made it with almost no money, played the role himself, grew the nails for real over years, and became a national figure.

The film is technically rough and the performance is enormous, and Coffin Joe remains one of the very few horror icons created outside the English-speaking world.

Censored heavily on release. There are two sequels and decades of television.