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You can keep your fast-moving zombies, 28 Years Later. The slowest zombies to perhaps ever feature in a movie can be found in Tombs of the Blind Dead, a 1972 cult film that takes many cues from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead but also weaves in plenty of European sleaze. These hungry ghouls hunt their prey at the speed of molasses, and that includes multiple scenes in which they ride slow-motion horses.
Still, even a shuffling chase can be high-tension, especially when there’s a bunch of crumbling Knights Templar corpses on your trail who have two purposes in their undead lives: to worship Satan, and to consume human flesh.
Our hapless characters find this out the hard way when they all have various reasons to visit Berzano, a ruined medieval town in the otherwise picturesque landscape near the border of Spain and Portugal (conveniently, the two countries that co-produced Tombs of the Blind Dead). After reconnecting by chance at a Lisbon swimming pool, former boarding-school roommates Bette (Lone Fleming) and Virginia (María Elena Arpón) impulsively decide to spend a weekend in the country with Roger (César Burner), Virginia’s sort-of boyfriend who immediately takes a flirtatious interest in Bette. It’s unclear if Virginia is more angry with Roger or Bette—thanks to a soft-focus flashback, we learn they were gal pals with benefits in their teen years—but she’s agitated enough to jump off a moving train to get away from the situation.
It’s just her luck that Barzano’s crumbling buildings are visible from her escape point, so she makes her way there, not realizing she’s chosen the worst possible place to enjoy a little solitude. We get a first-hand look at its lurking horrors—and how easily they’re awakened—but in keeping with its fondness for unhurried pacing, Tombs of the Blind Dead takes its time bringing the other characters into the fold. Bette and Roger grow concerned when Virginia doesn’t return, and their worries compound when a waitress in the area tells them Barzano is cursed—so cursed, in fact, that locals avoid even talking about it. “Modern folks don’t believe such tales,” she tells them, but it’s clear she 100% believes all the grim legends about the place.
Tombs of the Blind Dead checks off tropes that giallo and European horror fans will immediately recognize, including completely ineffective cops, a leering morgue attendant, and a disheveled professor overflowing with all the exposition anyone could ever need (complete with flashback to the Knights Templar breaking very bad, in this case). There are also delightful details included for no reason other than they add to the shock value, including Bette’s day job working in a warehouse full of creepy mannequins. Why mannequins? Well, why not? Why is it next door to the morgue? Why not?
Eventually, Virginia’s body (thoroughly chomped by dozens of teeth) turns up and the mysteries only deepen—despite that professor explaining everything, including this fun fact: the zombies are blind not because they’re centuries old and rotted through, but because when they were hanged after being excommunicated, crows pecked their peepers out. Bette and Roger, who seemingly can’t stand each other after being so giggly when they met, decide to play detective.
This leads to exponentially more agony, especially when they enlist a greasy smuggler and his aggressively horny girlfriend as backup, but there’s absolutely majestic pay-off to all of this in act three. The tidbit that the zombies hunt by sound since they have no eyes finally gets its big moment, as does a recurring bit where the brakeman on the train that runs past Barzano refuses to stop for any reason. When the creatures mount their horses and launch a climactic pursuit at a speed a snail would easily outrun, what happens next may very well signal the start of the apocalypse. The most glacially paced apocalypse ever, but still: sluggish doom awaits us all.
Tombs of the Blind Dead is now streaming on Shudder.
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