A De Ossorio Horror: Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)
When I was sixteen (it was a very good year), I bought a single from a band named the Templars called La Noche de los Gaviotas on Headache Records. The title of that record roughly translates to Night of the Seagulls. And on its cover a hooded figure is carrying a woman off to who knows where. At the time, I just figured that the image was a befittingly creepy cover to some good Oi! and punk, never giving any thought to where the name or that photograph came actually from. But only recently, while reading an interview with one the Templars’, I came to find out that the title of that album comes from a horror movie directed by a Spaniard named Amando De Ossorio.
Amando De Ossorio isn’t now well known – and I kinda doubt that he accumulated too much fame during his lifetime. But in the wake of his demise, the devoted cult of horror fans has flocked to his films that focus on the Knights Templar. The actual Templars were a Christian league of crusading knights that famously led portions of the Crusades and returned west with untold gold, relics and supposedly knowledge unfit for anyone other than the most dastardly – or something like that.
De Ossorio utilizes these claims of otherworldly tampering that may have included unholy sacrifices and summoning of evil spirits in order to gain ever lasting life. It sounds pretty over blown now – and it is. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, it was the 12th century after all. And supposedly, the way in which the order met its demise was through a swift, early morning raid on the Knights’ various strongholds throughout the Europe. Some are to have escaped, but the ones who didn’t are to have been killed on the spot with their bodies hung from trees throughout the countryside to alert peasants and town’s people that their area was safe from the evil figures.
These deaths and mystic vibrations are what Tombs of the Blind Dead (La Noche del Terror Ciego) are based upon. Using the frame of two old school friends, Virginia and Betty, reuniting, the former is quickly alienated from her boyfriend as he immediately express an interest in this new found friend. The trio is to go camping, but on the trip Virginia hastily disembarks from the train they’re all on and wonders off into the country side. She stumbles into the abandoned town of Berzano, where the dead Templar knights are apparently entombed. Her presence there leads to all kinds of problems.
What this film does well is look nice. There are innumerable shots of Virginia wondering through Berzano that seem more like still photographs than film. But as the loose and easy plot fails to create any sort of sympathy towards the characters, it’s these images the viewers must fall back on to enjoy the feature. Well, that and watching the Templars attack on horse back in exaggerated, yet ghostly slow motion.
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