Director: Amando de Ossorio
Writers: Jesús Navarro Carrión, Amando de Ossorio
Stars: Lone Fleming, César Burner, María Elena Arpón
1 Hour, 41 Minutes, Spanish, Subtitles
We start out with scenes of abandoned ruins. Betty meets Virginia at the pool in Lisbon. Virginia introduces her to her boyfriend, Roger, and they invite her to go with them to their hotel in the country. She doesn’t want to come with them, but Roger charms her, so they all get on the train.
Roger and Betty hit it off quickly, and Virginia starts getting jealous. It seems that Virginia and Betty have been attracted to one another since their school days together, and there’s a flashback of them being lovers in the past. The ticket taker on the train explains that there are no towns for many miles, but Virginia sees a road and what looks like a town on the horizon, so she jumps off the train.
The conductor doesn’t want to stop or even slow down the train, “She doesn’t know what she’s getting into,” he says. This area has a known reputation.
Virginia marches to the “town” she saw and finds that it’s just a ruin with a cemetery. She wanders through the creepy old monastery for a long time, and it’s obvious that this was filmed on location somewhere very interesting. She explores the place and starts a fire in a fireplace. She gets ready for bed; fortunately, she brought a sleeping bag (on her train trip to a hotel in the country). She turns on her portable radio, opens a book, and it’s a fun campsite!
Then the dead start climbing out of the ground. The fog rolls in, and the tombstones start shifting around in the ground. They’re skeletal figures who all mount undead horses. Virginia goes to sleep as the horsemen pass. The horses all wear shrouds as well. She hears them out there, puts in her clothes, and goes to investigate. One of the dead reaches inside and unlocks the door. They chase her until she finds a horse (an undead horse?) and rides away. The dead horsemen pursue her through many fields, and when they get off their horses, they don’t seem so slow anymore…
The next day, Roger and Betty start searching for Virginia. The waitress mentions Berzano, an abandoned place, but she gets scared when they start talking about going there. Everyone knows that’s a bad place.
Meanwhile, the train conductor spots Virginia’s dead body from the train and calls the police, but Roger and Betty are already on the way. They explore the ruins and ride right through the cemetery, which looks untouched and undisturbed. The horses get scared and leave them.
Roger sees the “Egyptian Crosses” on the graves and explains that they are Satanic. They find Virginia’s sleeping bag and stuff, but she’s nowhere to be found. They do run into two detectives from town, who explain that Virginia has been murdered.
They go and identify the body, and the coroner thinks it was some kind of ritual murder, since she was bitten with over a dozen sets of teeth.
Betty’s assistant comes from the area, and they ask her about Berzano. The city once belonged to the knights who worshipped Satan, and now the knights still come out of their tombs to hunt.
The coroner’s assistant is a very strange man, and as he’s gleefully torturing a frog, Virginia gets wheeled in after her autopsy. It looks at first like he’s going to rape the corpse, but he gets distracted by his frog. As he goes back to the frog, Virginia gets up and bites him in the neck.
They go see a professor who explains that the Pope excommunicated the knights for bringing the occult back from the orient. They sought immortality and performed Satanic rites. They were hated and feared by the locals. We get a flashback of the knights sacrificing a girl on the altar. They cut up the girl and drank her virgin blood. The ritual gave them eternal life, sort of. They were sentenced to death and they were hung until the crows ate out their eyes. They now find their victims by the sounds they make; they’re still blind.
Meanwhile, undead Virginia makes her way to Betty’s workshop and is set on fire by her assistant.
Roger wants Pedro, the professor’s smuggler son, and his girlfriend to go spend the night with him and Betty in Berzano. Pedro rapes Betty in the cemetery. He doesn’t believe any of this is real. The monastery bells ring, and Pedro watches the tombs open. They do to him what they did to Virginia.
Roger hears the screaming and shoots his pistol at the dead men, with no effect. Roger gets his arm cut off, but Pedro’s girlfriend won’t stop screaming, so they all go after her. Roger still dies, and the dead all hear Betty crying. She stops, but they can hear her heartbeat.
She runs for the train just as Virginia did, but this time the train stops for her. The conductor’s son goes to help Betty. The dead slowly get off their horses as the conductor’s son slowly drags Betty onto the train. They’re too slow, as the dead board the train and kill everyone aboard. Betty hides in the coal car, and the conductor starts the train just as he dies. The train makes a slow getaway.
When the train gets to the station, someone there stops it. The man helps Betty off the train; she’s the only survivor. Other passengers try to board the train, and the screaming begins…
Commentary
I liked it. It’s a little slow, and even a little dated, but the good parts all still work. The scenery and location here really make the movie, as do the creature’s costumes. The shrouds look like someone really had been buried in them hundreds of years ago. Most of the skeletons have beards, which is an interesting touch, as are the slow-motion shots of the horses. There are some gore effects, but they look pretty dated today.
The only real humor in the movie is from the coroner’s assistant, who gleefully shows Roger and Betty the wrong body on purpose.
Many of the “night” scenes were obviously shot in the daytime and a filter was used. Overall, if you like movies that hype up the “creepy” factor without too much character or story, you may like this one.