Trash Movie Review: The Blind Dead

Welcome to a review of a different kind. This time, a trash movie review of the four Blind Dead movies, all made by the Spanish director Amando De Ossorio. They’re horror movies made between 1972 and 1975 and they’re both scary and amusing - although the latter is more down to quality than down to a plan. The four movies are (English titles, not the original Spanish ones): Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972), Return of the Blind Dead (1973), The Ghost Galleon (1974), and Night of the Seagulls (1975).

The Blind Dead in the movies are knight monks - the Templars, although never really named - and they’re all blind. In some movies, they were blinded after a trial or by a mob, in others they lost their eyes while their corpses were hanging on the gallows, but they’re all blind zombies. That’s important, even though the effects are different in the movies. In Tombs of the Blind Dead (TOTBD), the zombies are blind, but hear well enough to find their prey by their heartbeat (and their victims become zombies themselves), whereas in the other movies, it’s often possible for a victim to hide in plain sight, as long as they’re cold-blooded enough to stay silent as the skeleton monks shamble past. Return of the Blind Dead (ROTBD) is the first case in which the hero sneaks past the monks in plain sight while saving a little girl from them.

There’s few movies where the Blind Dead are killed in the end. As a matter of fact, only ROTBD has a scene where the corpses collapse at sunrise when touched by the hero, the others suggest that the Blind Dead are still at it by the time the movie ends. In TOTBD, the knight monks leave their lonely hunting grounds on a train, which suggests they will carry their un-dead state into the world (since it’s the only movie where the victims rise as zombies themselves). In The Ghost Galleon (TGG), they walk out of the ocean at the end, clearly set on continuing their murder spree (the effect of the dead walking underwater isn’t quite as nice as in “The Curse of the Black Pearl,” but then, the movie was produced decades earlier). At the end of Night of the Seagulls (NOTS, the weakest), their seven nights of revenge just end - which suggests they will be back at some point. There is no clear victory for the hero, merely survival of a few people. The Blind Dead hover in the distance, can reappear at any point.

Even though there’s only four movies with the Blind Dead (at least officially), I know of a couple of other stories which feature similar beings. Some of them, like a German radio play or a German pulp novella (published in magazine form in the Dämonenland series), put the Blind Dead into another area (such as former Yugoslavia) and make them even more dangerous, only to destroy them afterwards.

The main difference between the Blind Dead and regular zombies is that the Blind Dead are very old and can’t be destroyed with a headshot. They may not be the fastest (unless they get on their horses), but they are persistent and they know what they are doing. They work together, they hunt in packs, and they feast on their prey. Whether or not that prey is turned, is a minor question.

The Blind Dead movies can still give you a scare today - something which not all old horror movies still can do. They’re also funny and often not on purpose, due to their effects. There are scenes when you can read the horses’ minds and know they’re wondering what kind of trash they got strapped to their backs. Yet, the hollow riding sounds and slightly slowed-down motions give the riding corpses (which is the translation in Germany) a scary impression. Of course, those long-dead Templars look funny sometimes, but they also give a good image of skull-faced creatures with twig-thin limbs which still manage to drag a healthy human away and rip them apart.

In addition to the gore, sex also plays a role in the movies. In every story, the Blind Dead in question were punished for dealing with the devil or other demons, kidnapping, torturing, and sacrificing young women, often after they were raped. And the 1970s Spanish-Portuguese horror movies show a lot of blood, gore, and sex - it was pretty much standard then. This makes the fact that a lot of victims of the Blind Dead are women (not unusual in 1970s horror in general) even more scary. While the Blind Dead clearly are no longer able to rape, they can still torture and kill.

Ossorio himself has claimed that his Blind Dead are mummies rather than zombies and, to a degree, he’s right there. They are no longer ‘wet’ - meaning they have no rotting flesh on their bones. They’ve been around for centuries (since all of the movies are set in the 20th century and the monks all were killed in the late middle ages) and are merely bones with a bit of old, brittle skin stretched over them. However, mummies are usually associated with a handful of cultures (mostly Ancient Egypt, but some South American cultures also mummified their dead), not with Spain. And the Blind Dead rise to feed on the living or make another sacrifice to their master, they are not roused from the dead by a crime committed on their tombs or suchlike. Neither have they risen to bring their long-lost love back to life (a story successfully used for every version of The Mummy so far). They’re out for blood, flesh, and revenge - but a little more intelligent than your regular garden-variety zombie.

The Blind Dead movies are not great movies by any definition. They are trash, they are B-movies at best. They’re also fun, though, if you find fun in bad movies. And most of them carry their story well (you might want to forego NOTS, which isn’t very good and also not in turn with the others time-wise, since it’s not set in the 1970s, but in the early 20th century). I sometimes put one of them into my DVD drive and enjoy a bit of a thrill with a lot of more or less accidental humour.