Tombs of the Blind Dead

Tombs of the Blind Dead
Original Spanish film poster
Directed by	Amando de Ossorio
Produced by	José Antonio Pérez Giner Salvadore Romero
Written by	Amando de Ossorio
Starring	Lone Fleming César Burner
Music by	Antón García Abril
Cinematography	Pablo Ripoll
Edited by	José Antonio Rojo
Distributed by	Hispamex
Release date	1972 (1972)
Running time	101 minutes
Country	Spain Portugal
Language	Spanish

Tombs of the Blind Dead is a 1972 Spanish-Portuguese horror film written and directed by Amando de Ossorio. Its original Spanish title is La noche del terror ciego, which means "The Night of the Blind Terror". The film is the first in Ossorio's Blind Dead series, and its success helped kickstart the Spanish horror film boom of the early 70s. Ossorio has stated that Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's Gothic horror legend El monte de las ánimas (1862) and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) both influenced the creation of this motion picture.

The Knights Templar (a fictionalized version of a real-life order that was dissolved in the 14th century following charges of witchcraft and heresy) come back from the dead as revenants. The reanimated corpses are blind, because their eyes were pecked out by birds while their hanged bodies rotted on the gallows. A young couple run into an old friend on vacation. The man invites the woman along for a train journey, but his girlfriend argues with him, jumps off the train and spends the night in the ruins of an abandoned monastery where the Templars are buried. The Templars rise from their tombs and kill her. The rest of the movie follows the efforts of the victim's boyfriend to find out what happened to her. He returns to the monastery with some friends where they are forced to confront the Blind Dead creatures.

Although the Knights are identifiable by their uniforms, they are never called "Templars" in the film; they are referred to as "Knights from the East". Ossorio objected to the description of the revenant Templars as "zombies", insisting that they more resembled mummies who feed like vampires and that, unlike zombies, the Templars were not mindless corpses.

The Spanish version, La Noche del Terror Ciego, differs from the English version Tombs of the Blind Dead. In the English version, a flashback of the living Knights Templar torturing a victim is moved to the beginning of the film, and most of the sex and gore (for instance, the scene depicting the lesbian relationship between Betty and Virginia and the sequence on a train in which the Knights Templar kill a woman in front of her child) is removed.