Forget Don’t Breathe… Here’s The Blind Dead!

A look at the classic Spanish sound-centric Blind Dead film series

With director Fede Alvarez’s white knuckle horror thriller Don’t Breathe still strangling the tail-end of the summer box office, we thought it appropriate to flash back to series of modestly budgeted Spanish horror films that similarly traded in the film’s central conceit.

In Don’t Breathe, a gaggle of young, thrill-seeking Detroit thugs break into a blind war vet’s home to rob him, well, blind. But what they don’t know is that said veteran is totally unhinged and totally deadly and can hunt his victims by sound alone. Hence the title. Many sweaty scenes follow featuring main characters attempting not to breathe, lest their vengeful vet assailant hear them and end their miserable lives.

In director Amando de Ossorio’s  beloved 1972 cult zombie horror film Tombs of the Blind Dead (aka The Blind Dead), unlucky wanderers end up in a crumbling Templar crypt, only to awake the moldering, skeletal and blind ghouls that sleep within. Armed with swords and riding spectral horses, this horde of horrible, bearded and blinded monsters stalk their victims, following the rasp of their breathing and the pitch of their screams, then cut them to pieces and drink their blood.

Hell, even not breathing doesn’t help, as de Ossorio’s Templar’s can hear your heart beat too.

RELATED: Exclusive interview with Tombs of the Blind Dead star Lone Fleming

Often dismissed as a Latin redux of George A. Romero’s groundbreaking zombie shocker Night of the Living Dead, Tombs of the Blind Dead is something richer, darker and ripe with atmosphere. Ossorio’s signature opus would spawn three more Templar companion films: 1973’s Return of the Evil Dead (aka Attack of the Blind Dead), 1974’s The Ghost Galleon (aka Horror of the Zombies) and 1975’s Night of the Seagulls. This unholy quartet were anomalies  at the time, due to their loose mythology stemming from the real life Templar Knights and the fact that the track their victims audibly.

Let’s look at Ossorio’s wonderful Blind Dead films and pay respect to the sound-driven killers that arrived a good 45 years before Stephen Lang used his ears to help enable harm those that dare cross his path.

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