10 great Brazilian horror films

Brazilian horror cinema begins precisely in 1964, with the release of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul. Made by José Mojica Marins, whose parents owned, ran and lived above a picture house where Marins grew up and acquired a taste for foreign horror, the film introduced the wilfully wicked Zé do Caixão, or ‘Coffin Joe’. Played by Marins, Joe is an undertaker, cutting a striking figure with his black stovepipe hat and cape, bushy beard, piercing eyes and unnaturally long, occasionally weaponised fingernails. He is also a sinister, sadistic, serial-killing scoundrel, driven both to maintain “the continuation of blood” by siring a son with the ‘perfect woman’ (whether she likes it or not), and to test his atheistic convictions by defying a putative God to punish him for increasingly transgressive outrages.

Two further features (This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, 1967, and the belated Embodiment of Evil, 2008) would complete Joe’s chronicles, and the Nietzschean über-villain would also make (less prominent) appearances in four other features (and additional shorts) directed by Marins – but what really cemented Joe’s status as Brazilian (counter) cultural icon while furthering (fathering, even) the nation’s nascent horror scene, was Marins’ in-character participation, over many decades from 1967, as horror host of several Brazilian television programmes (all now tragically lost) which showcased locally made horror shorts.

Like Coffin Joe, Marins casts a long shadow over Brazilian horror, inspiring his compatriots to take tropes established abroad, and to localise them in terms of language, setting, culture and religion.

Director: José Mojica Marins

Made on the eve of a military dictatorship that would last 21 years, Marins’ – and Brazil’s – first horror film opens with not one but two separate direct addresses to camera in which both protagonist Coffin Joe himself and an old witch (Eucaris Moraes) warn the viewer directly of the horrors to come in the film (which they refer to as a film). We are then forcefully aligned from beginning to end with a supercilious sadist who openly blasphemes, provokes violent fights, rapes, tortures and murders (his devoted wife and best friend being among the victims) with abandon.

In expressly claiming to commit such atrocities as proof that there is no God, Joe protests too much. For eventually this great sinner faces the punishment he secretly both dreads and craves, as he is undone by either supernatural revenge from beyond the grave, or the mortal terror of his own deep-seated guilt.

Director: Paulo Gil Soares

“We have always been good Christians and churchgoers,” says one-armed Calisto (Emmanuel Cavalcanti) in Paulo Gil Soares’ feature debut – whose title translates as ‘Feats of Satan in the Village of Leva-e-Traz’. This once harmonious hamlet has been abandoned by its young, able-bodied populace – as well as by the priest (Joseph Guerreiro), taking with him the sacred statue of the village’s patron saint – for a city prefabricated nearby to drill the oil newly discovered by Calisto himself. Now the remaining, mostly disabled villagers are visited by the Devil – as toad, headless mule, goat and itinerant horseman (Paulo Broitma) – who promises them, in the face of their own apocalypse, a miraculous if illusory renewal of prosperity.

Full of small-town superstitions, strange rituals, paganistic returns and chorus-like ballads, this early folk horror is also national satire, making its sleepy village a microcosm of a Brazil rapidly succumbing to exploitative modernisation and soul-destroying secularisation.

Director: Walter Hugo Khouri

Ana (Selma Egrei), a psychology student from Rio de Janeiro, is hired to look after children Marcelo (Pedro Coelho) and Carolina (Rejane Saliamis) in an isolated Pétropolis villa while their well-heeled parents (Lilian Lemmertz, Fernando Amaral) are away for the weekend. On the first night, with nightwatchman Augusto (Eliezer Gomes) the only other person on the grounds, Ana starts to receive frightening crank calls, and suspects that they are coming from inside the house.

Taking its cue as much from Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) as from Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) and the urban legend of “the babysitter and the man upstairs”, Walter Hugo Khouri’s slow-burning thriller blends the psychological with hints of the supernatural, while never forgetting, in this old, opulent manor house staffed with proletarian servants, the social. As wide-eyed Ana explores her new environs with envy and increasing unease, everyone here seems possessed by the genius loci.

Director: Antonio Bonacin Thome

Camping with female friends on a beach holiday, Belinda (Nicole Puzzi) witnesses a nocturnal ritual where a mysterious woman predicts pain and even death for her, but promises protection. Belinda catches the eye of Adilson (Waldir Siebert), but as innocent romance blooms, the young lovers are kidnapped by three vicious drug dealers and their moll who are seeking vengeance against Adilson’s narcotics cop father.

Subjecting youthful innocence to abduction, rape and forced overdosing, Antonio Bonacin Thome’s feature feels like a remake of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), except that this ruthless gang will meet with revenge not from Belinda’s and Adilson’s families but from an orixá or guardian spirit. So while this is unabashed exploitation cinema, full of gratuitous nudity, sex and violence not unlike in Thome’s previous rape revenger Na Violência do Sexo (1978), it also features a supernatural element borrowed from the local Candomblé religion.

Director: Jair Correia

After a gig at a lakeside house, the musicians and several members of their audience stay behind overnight, only to fall victim to a relentless, patient strangler who leaves behind him a trail of bodies, and sometimes frames those still living for his crimes.

With its title translating as ‘devilish fun’, Jerr Correia’s film is Brazil’s relatively late entry in the slasher canon. It also breaks all the rules. The virgin is not the final girl. The killer wears no mask (although his face is kept out of shot). Several characters quickly decide to stick together. Yet the killer’s rampage is set against a backdrop of pushy, impulsive boyfriends and ignored (or abused) girlfriends, and in the film’s final moments, a culturally rampant machismo is itself pinned as the real culprit. So Correia and co-writer Gertrude Eisenlohr use borrowed genre tropes to diagnose the pathology of pervasive patriarchy in Brazil.

Director: Fauzi Mansur

A sacred book is stolen so that its ancient ritual of Egyptian human sacrifice can be literally restaged for “a really exotic horror show” in a local theatre – while the play’s impresario has nefarious plans to resurrect his malevolent uncle. Meanwhile the play’s lead Brad (Olair Coan) is transformed by the exercise into a serial-killing monster.

The second of prolific sexploitation director Fauzi Mansur’s horror forays – following his Satanic Attraction (1989) – is Brazil’s answer to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ similarly themed Blood Feast (1963). This is not just because of its surreal syncretism of (fictive) Pharaonic rites with modern mores, but also its nonsensical plotting, ridiculous dialogue, flat deadpan characterisation and cheap splattery gore. It is utter trash, but also utterly aware of both its audience and of itself (there is even an improbably recontextualised quote of the last line from Casablanca). This cult movie is beyond good and evil.

Director: Rodrigo Aragão

“Everything is rotten,” says Luís (Walderrama Dos Santos) of his backwater home where the polluted rivers have stopped yielding fish, and where the people have become mean-spirited and abusive. Yet as zombies rise from the swamp, this lovesick loser will go from zero to hero in keeping his sweetheart neighbour Raquel (Kika Oliveira) safe.

With a title that translates literally as ‘black mangrove’ (leaving aside its more prosaic English title), this outrageous eco-horror generously splatters its own Amazonian flavour over obvious riffs on The Evil Dead (1981) and Braindead (1992). Its writer/director/DP/editor/effects man Rodrigo Aragão is a fan and eventual friend of – and ultimately cinematic heir to – José Mojica Marins, and carries on Marins’ spirit with this low-budget labour of love, all gloopy practical effects and rough edges. While it might not be Aragão’s finest – for he has got better with each one – it is a great debut.

Directors: Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas

Pregnant and ostracised by her privileged family, Ana (Marjorie Estiano) hires Clara (Isabél Zuaa) to be maid/nanny in her São Paulo apartment, and this odd couple – one white and privileged, one black and poor – become lovers, even as the full moon triggers peculiar behavioural changes in Ana. Some years later, Clara looks after Ana’s young son Joel (Miguel Lobo) alone, and tries to tame his inherent animalistic impulses and appetites with her instruction in civilised manners, as well as with some monthly physical restraints.

Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s modern fairytale finds expression – sometimes musical – for a modern Brazil where the different classes, races, sexes and even species are at odds unless loving accommodation can be found for them. Here the werewolf myth allows traditional notions of family ties and maternal instincts to be stretched to their outer limits, as societal tensions and masculine drives unleash the beast within.

Directors: Armando Fonseca and Kapel Furman

As an urban shaman (Wilton Andrade), a faithless priest (Ricardo Gelli), a compromised police detective (Natallia Rodrigues) and a multinational paramilitary (Tristan Aronovich) all follow a trail of brutal ritualistic slayings in contemporary São Paulo, they are playing out a repeating history of locals doing their best to preserve the nation from apocalyptic evil, and outsiders appropriating and exploiting local culture to their own malevolent ends.

Armando Fonseca and Kapel Furman’s second feature returns the favour by adopting its form from an established Hollywood genre, except that where, in the classic slasher, the killer dons a mask, here the mask – a pre-Columbian artefact infused with the ancient spirit Anhangá – dons the killer, transforming its wearer into a collector of human hearts for the resurrection of chthonic deity Tahawantinsupay. What ensues is an outrageously gory clash of religious, corporate and constabulary interests in the divided, privatised Brazil of then President Bolsonaro.

Director: Daniel Bandeira

After being violently taken hostage by a stranger on the street, Tereza (Malu Galli) is left traumatised and agoraphobic, but reluctantly agrees to drive with her husband Roberto (Tavinho Teixeira) out to the large inherited country estate that he plans to convert to a hotel. The indentured, exploited labourers actually running this farm are now faced with losing their homes, papers and income, and decide to take matters in their own hands. As things take an extreme turn, these workers become no less trapped in their actions than Tereza is in Roberto’s brand-new armoured car.

There is no monster, bogeyman or spectre in writer/director Daniel Bandeira’s incendiary film. Rather, as the soil of this land yields a burial ground rather than any social good, Bandeira unearths the ugly, irresolvable class divide in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and the hard horror of capitalism itself, where ultimately everyone is perpetrator, victim and hostage.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul screens as part of our Brazil on Film season, running at BFI Southbank from 1 May to 30 June 2026.

This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse is on BFI Player from 4 May.