Tombs of the Blind Dead

• The Templars' rotting, hollow-eyed look was designed under makeup artist José Luis Campos, working closely with director Amando de Ossorio's own vision for the decayed knights.
• Cinematographer Pablo Ripoll shot the Templars' attacks — on foot and on horseback — in slow motion, a choice that builds dread even though the 'blind' knights are meant to be relentless, deadly hunters.
• The eerie ruins are the real Santa María la Real de Valdeiglesias monastery in Pelayos de la Presa, Spain, with additional exteriors shot around Lisbon, Palmela, Setúbal, Sesimbra and Estoril in Portugal — no sets were built.
• Spain got the film uncut in theaters on April 10, 1972; the U.S. release a year later, retitled The Blind Dead, trimmed a lesbian subplot, a rape scene and a train murder to satisfy American distributors.
• Composer Antón García Abril gave the film its unnerving atonal score of piano, percussion, organ and Gregorian-style chanting, then went on to score all three Blind Dead sequels.

The knights' blindness reads as the moral myopia of the religious and political powers that persecuted the real Knights Templar in the early 1300s, where faith and power justified atrocities without ever seeing the human cost.

The fog that accompanies the Templars acts as a purgatorial veil, suggesting the entire ordeal takes place in a limbo between life and damnation for the sinful victims.

The survivors' inability to escape the ruins mirrors Spain's trapped psyche under Franco, unable to flee the ghosts of its violent historical past.

A jealous spat sends a woman wandering alone off a train and into the ruins of Berzano, where the Knights Templar — hanged centuries earlier for black-magic rituals and left blind after crows picked their corpses clean on the gallows — claw out of their graves to hunt by sound alone. When her friends go looking for her, they find the gutted monastery instead, and the reanimated knights rise on foot and on horseback with slow, deliberate menace. Guns prove useless against the rotting horde, and the survivors' last stand plays out aboard a moving train the Templars manage to board and slaughter their way through. The film strips away the glory of holy war, leaving only rotting flesh and an insatiable hunger no prayer can sate in this Spanish countryside nightmare.