🇧🇷Brazil

Brazilian horror cinema begins with one man: José Mojica Marins, who created the character Zé do Caixão — Coffin Joe — a sadistic, atheist gravedigger in a top hat and cape, obsessed with finding the perfect woman to bear his child. Unable to find anyone willing to play the role, Marins cast himself. At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964) was the first Brazilian horror film, mixing crude production values with startling blasphemy and brutality that scandalised conservative audiences. Its sequel This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967) pushed further, and The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968), a three-segment anthology, extended his sadistic vision into formally inventive territory. Marins continued through the 1970s with increasingly censored works including The Awakening of the Beast (1970), a pseudo-documentary on hallucinogenics that included an autobiographical fourth-wall break. Working entirely outside the intellectual Cinema Novo movement that dominated Brazilian art cinema at the time, Marins created a uniquely Brazilian Gothic sensibility rooted in Catholic guilt, sexual transgression, and philosophical nihilism — though his films would not reach international audiences until video distribution in the early 1990s.

Brazilian horror largely went dormant after Marins' productive period, with sporadic exploitation and low-budget production through the 1980s and 1990s that left little lasting mark. The revival began with Marins himself: Embodiment of Evil (2008), the long-awaited third film in the Coffin Joe trilogy, arrived nearly four decades after the second and helped spark what has been called a second golden age of Brazilian horror, driven largely by first-time directors. Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, working together and individually, emerged as the wave's defining filmmakers, alongside Anita Rocha da Silveira, Dennison Ramalho, and others. Specialised genre festivals — Fantaspoa, CineFantasy, RioFan — emerged to support a growing community of horror filmmakers working on modest budgets but with increasing ambition.

Modern Brazilian horror has found international recognition through films that use the supernatural to examine the country's deep social fractures. Dutra and Rojas's Hard Labor (2011) grounded supernatural horror in the everyday economic stress of a São Paulo couple opening a corner shop, and their Good Manners (2017), a werewolf story set across São Paulo's class divide, combined genre filmmaking with pointed commentary on race and inequality. Marco Dutra's solo feature When I Was Alive (2014) fused family drama with possession-horror anxieties. Anita Rocha da Silveira's Kill Me Please (2015), set among privileged Rio teenagers haunted by a string of serial killings, brought a female-directed sensibility to Brazilian horror. The Devil Lives Here (2016) engaged Afro-Brazilian religious traditions through a slave-era haunting; Dennison Ramalho's The Nightshifter (2019), about a morgue attendant who can communicate with the dead, drew on the country's syncretic spiritual traditions. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles's Bacurau (2019), a sociopolitical horror-Western about a remote village resisting Western-tourist hunters and starring Sonia Braga, became the wave's international breakthrough. The 2020s have continued the run with Skull: The Mask (2020), an unrestrained Aztec-deity gore opera. These contemporary works share a willingness to ground horror in recognisably Brazilian settings and anxieties — economic instability, urban overcrowding, the legacy of colonialism — while demonstrating that a national horror cinema need not produce in volume to produce work of genuine distinction.