Original title: La noche del terror ciego

The success of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) inspired many a lookalike during the 1970s and beyond. What makes Amando de Ossorio’s response to the film’s Spanish success different is that instead of simply using zombies, he minted a whole new monster with its own mythology that proved popular enough with the public to warrant a further four films. De Ossiorio always balked at the suggestion that his slow moving, cadaverous undead Knights Templar were zombies, referring to them as mummies or vampires though in truth they exhibit the behaviour of all three.

While on holiday in a region on the Spanish/Portuguese border with her friend Roger (César Burner), Virginia (María Elena Arpón, credited here as Helen Harp) is reunited with college friend Betty (Lone Fleming) who now runs a mannequin factory in the area. Roger is immediately attracted to Betty and invites her to join them on a train trip, much to the dismay of Virginia who once had a sexual relationship with Betty. Unable to cope with her reawakened feelings, Virginia jumps off the train as if passes near the long abandoned town of Berzano where she seeks shelter for the night. But the town is home to the Knights Templar, an immortal, undead band of Satanists who survive on human blood. Blind after their eyes were pecked out by birds when they were hung in medieval times, the Templars hunt by sound and, attracted by the sound of her transistor radio, attack Virginia. Her body is taken to a morgue next to Betty’s factory where she revives and kills an attendant before being burned to death by Betty’s assistant. Having learned of the legend of the Templars, Betty and Roger travel to Berzano to see if there’s any truth to the local legends about them – but the Templars are waiting for them.

Though it takes its own sweet time getting going and has a tendency to wander off down various diversions, Tombs of the Blind Dead is nevertheless a fascinating and often genuinely creepy film. It’s not hard to see why English language distributors moved the flashback to the creation of the Templars, with them being put to death after flagellating a young woman (Britt Nicols) in one of their rituals, to the start of the film as in the Spanish original they don’t appear at all in the first thirty minutes. The lesbian relationship goes nowhere and is included simply to justify a rather chaste sex scene, after which it’s never mentioned again and later there are a lot of inflamed passions as Betty and Roger find themselves in the unpleasant company of the brutish Pedro (José Thelman) and his jealous lover Nina (Verónica Llimera) in Berzano, which also includes the seemingly obligatory rape scene. It all serves to slow things down a bit but when the Templars turn up the film switches gears and becomes something altogether more interesting.

The Templars, roaming the countryside in slow motion aboard their undead steeds, are unforgettable creations. Skeletal, draped in filth-encrusted robes and relentless in their pursuit of their victims – their slo-mo, horseback stalking of Virginia has a genuinely nightmarish quality to it – they’re a welcome change from the usual lumbering cadavers seen in many 70s and 80s zombie films. As they terrorise Virginia, their bony hands reach through the tiniest cracks in the walls and doors to clutch at her and later in the film, they get a marvellous scenes in which the track the terrified Betty simply by hearing her heightened heartbeat.

The decision to film them in slow motion was inspired, making their appearance even more unworldly. Antón García Abril’s eerie score helps no end too. When it’s not concerned with cheesy and oh-so-70s organ interludes (there seems to have been a surfeit of electronic organs available to Euro horror composers in the early 70s…) it’s a cacophonous stew of clanging percussion, cod-Gregorian chanting and unsettling, hard-to-pin-down noises that set the nerves a-jangle every time the Templars hove into view.

There’s never really an explanation for why Virginia returns to life, moving like a Romero zombie but biting the neck of the appallingly misogynistic morgue attendant like a hungry vampire. Not is there any particular reason why she wanders off to Betty’s factory other than to allow de Ossorio to indulge his admiration for Mario Bava by flooding the building with a glowing red light (there’s a neon factory upstairs, we’re told) and recalling Bava’s pioneering giallo 6 donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (1964). It’s an inexplicable moment but a fantastically creepy one.

Also memorable is the finale – the Templars have massacred the passengers of the train, desecrating it’s rather quaint old world charm, and a traumatised Betty, hair turned white by the shock of her long night of blind terror, screaming uncontrollably. The camera tracks back from a black and white still frame of the scene as Betty’s screams are joined by those of new passengers who have boarded the train to find either the scenes of the massacre, the Templars or both before a skeletal hand slaps into view for one last shock.

Tombs of the Blind Dead led to three more outings for the Templars, none of them anywhere near as good as the first but all with something of interest going on. El ataque de los muertos sin ojos/Return of the Blind Dead/Return of the Evil Dead (1973) is pretty much more of the same, with the ancient Templars once again rising up to pursue, kill and feed on their predominantly young victims (a theme that runs throughout the series), this time featuring a different group of Templars in a Portuguese village; El buque maldito/The Ghost Galleon has the participants in a modelling shoot fall prey to seafaring Templars; and La noche de las gaviotas/Night of the Seagulls (1975) sees them riding out of the sea to lay waste to a small coastal town.

As well as the familiar Tombs of the Blind Dead re-edit which, as noted, moves the flashback sequence and also tones down the sex and violence, a less frequently seen US variant exists that bizarrely tries to link the film to the popular Planet of the Apes films. This version, released under the clumsy title Revenge from Planet Ape, removed the flashback altogether and featured new bookend sequences and a narration that set the film in a post-apocalyptic future, the Templars being recast as undead intelligent apes: “Legend has it, almost 3,000 years ago, a simian civilization of super-intelligent apes struggled with man to gain control of this planet. In the end, man conquered ape after a brutal battle, which saw him destroy the ape, his culture and society. After this battle, man tortured and killed all the ape prisoners by piercing their eyes with a red-hot poker. One of the prisoners, who was also the leader of the apes, vowed they would return from the dead to avenge man’s brutality – at a point in time before man destroyed Earth himself. That time is now.”