Marpessa Dawn and Breno Mello both passed away this year, which is too bad, but does provide an opening to bring up the one big film of their lives. ("Bring up," not "review," 'cause I spent two days not being able to find my copy in a garage full of boxes and being too cheap to rent something I already own; so I didn't get to rewatch it, but what the hell I love this movie anyway, and at least that means I'll keep this mercifully short.)
Black Orpheus is not horror, but it is a fable about our greatest fears (death and loss). And actually the film sort of divides neatly into two different horrorish films. The first features Death (in a fantastic skeleton/spiderweb/luchador costume) stalking Eurydice during Carnaval: Death is persistent and (despite costume-switching) not easy to fool; the scene where Death pursues Eurydice during the samba competition, and Orfeu chases both of them to the trolley station, is both suspenseful and garishly outsize, all Hitchcock pacing and Fellini visuals. The second, after Eurydice's death, is about the disorientation, the existential confusion of loss: Orfeu first attempts to find the dead Eurydice at the Bureau of Missing Persons; the Tiresias-like (he's blind, maybe? there's someone blind in this film...) janitor tells him where he can find his love--through a medium in a candomblé ceremony. 'Cause she's dead, right? From here, it's the great tragedy of the fable--Orfeu is not only unable to bring Eurydice back, he is even incapable of not causing her loss again.
The movement from natural suspense (someone stalking Eurydice) to supernatural terror (freakin' Death stalking Eurydice) to existential horror (you and everyone you have ever loved will die) is basically all the horror content Black Orpheus offers, but that's quite enough. Not to mention the wonderful songs, bold colors, classical allusions, and the most achingly sweet scene of children dancing that ever closed a movie.
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