Horror nerds have thoroughly mined every last golden nugget of vintage Italo horror schlock. We’ve already seen & celebrated every Bava, Argento, and Fulci worth a damn, and Vinegar Syndrome is now approaching its dozenth volume of “Forgotten Gialli” Blu-ray box sets, having scraped past the bottom of the barrel into the mud underneath. There’s nothing left. One solution to this new scarcity of hidden 70s & 80s Euro horror gems is to look instead to the contemporary genre cinema of Spain, which boasts all of the same stylistic & cultural points of interest as their Italian equivalents, just dubbed in a different out-of-sync language. For your next giallo fix, for instance, you can look to the sleazy Spanish murder mystery The Corruption of Chris Miller, and for your next late night zombi flick, you can explore the Tombs of the Blind Dead, a Spanish graveyard whatsit with multiple deliriously plotted sequels and a decidedly Fulcistic vibe. There were, in fact, other countries in Europe besides Italy making their own high-style, low-logic horror movies throughout the 1970s & 80s, and Spain is as good of a place to start digging as any.

The titular blind dead of this series are the decrepit remains of the medieval Knights Templar, who made a Monkey’s Paw deal with Satan during the Crusades to live forever without thinking through the continual, natural decay of their ancient bodies. They haunt the crumbling ruins of rural Spain, occasionally rising from their graves as sword-wielding Harryhausen skeletons. The main attraction of the Blind Dead series is watching these skeletal knights ride their ghostly horses in slow-motion, making a show of waving around their swords as if posing for a heavy metal album cover. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, their blindness is a result of their eyes having been pecked out by birds while hanging for their crimes against living locals, while in Return of the Blind Dead, their eyes were intentionally burned out of their skulls by those angry locals. In either case, they cyclically rise for revenge, searching for hot young hippie babes to sacrifice to Satan for further supernatural favors (by eating those babes’ beating hearts fresh out of their exposed chests). They’re total jerks who cause great harm to their neighbors, but they look really cool doing so.

Like in their zombi Italo equivalents, the scene-to-scene logic of the Blind Dead films don’t matter as much as their overall mood, which relies heavily on the temporal contrast between the medieval knights of Old Europe and the sexually liberated youth of contemporary modernity. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, the knights are awoken when a young bikinied hippie breaks away from an awkward beach vacation where she’s being hounded for sex by both her current boyfriend and a lesbian boarding school chum from her past. Once alone, she makes the mistake of enjoying a cigarette while listening to swanky jazz at the burial site of the Knights Templar and is cosmically punished for her moral crimes by being violently swarmed and then gently nibbled alive. Once free from their graves, the knights are seemingly able to roam freely, and the movie finds great novelty in having the ancient ghouls invade distinctly urban spaces like the local mannequin factory and the nearby city morgue. We’re eventually treated to a flashback to the living knights’ heyday sacrificing an earlier generation of hot babes to Satan during the Crusades, but those medieval tapestries are just a brief reprieve from the knights’ oddly modern hijinks.

Blind Dead mastermind Amando de Ossorio was apparently very proud of his staging of the knights’ initial rising from the grave, since that exact footage from the first film is repeated in the following year’s Return of the Blind Dead and then again in 1975’s Night of the Seagulls. As you can likely tell by that latter title, the knights take an unexpected nautical detour halfway into the series, which further confuses its internal narrative logic. Return of the Blind Dead is a straightforward repeat & escalation of the original, while its immediate follow-up The Ghost Galleon (1974) leaves the graveyard behind to set sail. You see, the undead knights are now anchored to a gigantic ghost ship that exists in an alternate nightmare dimension that can only crossover into ours through the conduit of cosmic fog. Once that ship inevitably sinks, they go underwater, emerging from a nearby beach in Night of the Seagulls to once again gently cannibalize buxom women’s beating hearts. Those women’s spirits then return to this mortal plane as seagulls so they can scream in pain, which the townfolk can distinguish from the cries of regular seagulls because regular seagulls cannot fly at night. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but at least it’s poetic.

While the Knights Templar’s nautical side adventures in The Ghost Galleon & Night of the Seagulls sound wonderfully delirious on paper, Amando de Ossorio never again reached the artistic highs he achieved in the original Tombs of the Blind Dead. It’s impractical, but the blind dead really should be wielding swords on horseback in every picture regardless of whether they’re traveling by ghost ship. They’re severely less metal when they’re on-foot & swordless. The original film also has surprisingly surreal visual touches, like the intrusion of present-day train steam into the hippies’ boarding school flashbacks. Meanwhile, the most surreal aspect of Night of the Seagulls is how absurdly inept it is at the “day for night” illusion, completely disorienting its audience’s sense of time. Multiple scenes appear to take place both at midnight and at high-noon, simultaneously. The beachside locale is put to good use when local crabs are invited to join in on the knight’s oddly delicate flesh-eating, though, so it’s got its own minor points of visual interest here or there.

One way you can tell Tombs of the Blind Dead and its progressively ropy sequels belong to the same vintage Euro horror lineage as their Italo contemporaries is by puzzling through the confused history of their distribution. Upon initial release, they were each globally exported under different titles and different edits, with little care paid to artistic integrity or series continuity. Oddly, Tombs of the Blind Dead was rebranded for a US theatrical run as Revenge from Planet Ape, as if it were more directly inspired by Planet of the Apes than by the more obvious point of reference Night of the Living Dead. The Ghost Galleon was marketed as Horror of the Zombies, Ship of Zombies and, in Germany, The Ghost Ship of Swimming Corpses, while Night of the Seagulls was marketed as Don’t Go Out at Night and Night of the Death Cult, each title distancing these sequels from belonging to a larger Blind Dead franchise. Even within Spain, the “blind dead” became the “eyeless dead” in the series’ second outing, jumbling the brand. Nowadays, all four films are stuck between two extremely different modes of distribution: pristinely restored to their original form by boutique Blu-ray companies like Synapse, Vinegar Syndrome, and Shout Factory, or clumsily edited & dubbed as English-language bastardizations on Tubi, nothing inbetween. Movies don’t get much more vintage Italo horror than that.

-Brandon Ledet