Morning of the Carnival

Can Black Orpheus (1959) be considered a Horrorween movie? The season is all wrong of course, since it takes place at Carnival, in the spring (or fall, because Brazil is in the southern hemisphere?). But it does have a mysterious deadly figure and some voodoo. Anyway, it's just a great movie.

Marpessa Dawn, Eurydice, arrives in Rio by ferry and takes a streetcar to Babylon - a little neighborhood high on a hill. The conductor, Breno Mello, Orfeu, flirts with her, and introduces her to Hermes, a railroad worker who knows everything about the neighborhood. She is staying with her cousin, because a strange man is threatening to kill her. 

It turns out that Orfeu lives next door. He is getting marries to Mira, although he is pretty blase about it. He refuses to get her a ring, needing the money to get his guitar out of hock for the festival. But he lets her take him to get the license, where the clerk asks Mira if she is Eurydice. Isn't that who marries Orfeu? Orfeu hasn't even learned the name of the girl he flirted with.

But he finds out when Eurydice's tormentor, masked and dressed as a skeleton, attacks her and Orfeu runs him off. When Eurydice's cousin's boyfriend comes home, Orfeu invites Eurydice to stay in his bed - he will sleep outside of course. But that doesn't last very long.

It is now the morning of the carnival. Orfeu is leading the Babylon crew (if that's what they are called in Brazil), and Eurydice's cousin decides to stay home with her man, sending Eurydice in her place. And so the man with the skeleton costume finds her and kills her.

Orfeu goes to see her at the morgue, but a janitor tells him he won't find her there. He takes him to a voodoo ceremony, where he hears her voice telling him not to turn around. He looks behind and finds an old woman speaking in her voice. She is lost to him forever.

But two little boys who have been following Orfeu the whole movie now have his guitar. One says that Orfeu's playing makes the sun come up and encourages his friend to play. He plays for a little girl and his friend, and the sun does rise. As he says, Orfeu is not the first of that name, and won't be the last.

All this leaves out the Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa music, samba and Bossa Nova, and tons of percussion in the streets. That and the beauty and soul of Rio and it's people are the best parts of this classic.