Those of you who are fans of the Assassin's Creed franchise will recognize the monsters here: the Knights Templar (the ones Altair didn't get, apparently). For practicing human sacrifice, these Spanish Templars were sentenced to death, their eyes pecked out by hungry crows. Accidental contact with modern people revives them as rotting, undead predators. Since they have no eyes, they hunt by sound, including heartbeats, seeking victims whose blood they drain by biting. And fighting them is a losing proposition, because these undead knights still wield the broadswords they used in life.
I think I should mention that the Knights Templar in this film are not true vampires, not in a cinematic sense, anyway. They don't sleep in coffins. They don't turn into bats. And they don't fear the sun. The usual weaknesses of vampires are not to be found here. The rotten, almost skeletal condition of these creatures might tempt modern viewers to think of them as zombies. That might be intentional, since Ossorio said that he was inspired by the late George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. But it would not be accurate to describe them as zombies, either. For one thing, they're not mindless. They have intelligence and will. In this case, the best term to describe them is "revenant,"
a sort of catch-all term for the undead. That's what these things are.
While not especially gory compared to, say, the Evil Dead, the idea behind the monsters is disturbing, to say the least.
Tombs of the Blind Dead is the title it was given in North America, where it was released dubbed into English and cut by almost twenty minutes. The original Spanish cut was titled La Noche del Terror Ciego, which translates as "Night of Blind Terror," which is a cunning double meaning, given the characters' reactions when encountering Altair's old enemies.
My advice? Don't bother with the English edit. Go right for the original
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