Awakening of the Beast (Portuguese: O Despertar da Besta, also released as Portuguese: O Ritual dos Sádicos) is a 1970 Brazilian horror/exploitation film directed by José Mojica Marins. Marins is also known by his alter ego Coffin Joe (Zé do Caixão). Marins appears as himself and as the Coffin Joe character in the fictional film which is in the form of a pseudodocumentary.
Plot[]
In the film's first portion, filmed in black and white, Dr. Sergio, a psychiatrist, appears on a television program on a panel with three other contemporary psychiatrists after he claims to have conducted experiments on four volunteer drug addicts with LSD in order to investigate his claim that sexual perversion is caused by use of illegal drugs. As evidence, he presents a series of documented accounts of drug use which led to lewd and bizarre sexual acts. Marins appears (as himself) on the panel with the psychiatrists as some type of expert on the subject of depravity. During the program, Dr. Sergio recounts the experiment to his colleagues on the panel, who reject his claims.
Dr. Sergio gathers the four volunteers, and after receiving an injection, the volunteers (four drug users seen in the previous segments) are instructed to stare at a movie poster of Marins' The Strange World of Coffin Joe. The film changes to color and each patient's experience is vividly portrayed in a series of surreal scenes.
The film switches back to black and white, and Dr. Sergio reveals that he did not in fact give the patients LSD, but rather a placebo, and their experiences were caused purely by their reactions to the Coffin Joe movie poster.