Tombs of the Blind Cred: the use and abuse of Amando de Ossorio's cult horror franchise in extreme metal

Extreme horror and extreme metal have long been kin, well beyond such obvious overlapping concentric circles like wildly dreadful soundtracks or dull, plodding songs about zombie movies. The rise of VHS and the rise of death metal occurred in tandem, and arguably you wouldn't have had the latter without the former making Cannibal Holocaust widely available to a generation whose idea of horror was otherwise limited to grabbing their first boob to the opening bars of John Carpenter's Halloween at the drive-in. Just ask Kam Lee, of Mantas, Death and Massacre, or Killjoy of Necrophagia, both still as unabashed horror fiends as they were when they first growled into an 8-track.

The first decade of the 21st Century is the decade of options. Every single strata of human activity is categorised and sub-categorised, codified and transformed into merely another consumer option. Would sir like a hazelnut triple-shot soya latte, PVC gimp suit with chrome nipple clamps, or a late '70s Spanish horror classic? Extreme metal has always relied on an element of historical re-enactment. The reference points aren't even yesterday's bands, they're last Tuesday's bands, and unsurprisingly '80s horror has remained one of the most oft-mined seams of material for midwestern brutal death bands and Scandinavian buzzsaw riffmasters both.

As if this lazy aping of yesterday's genre conventions wasn't enough, the world of uberkvlt-deathdoom is infamous for its monomaniacal fixation with just one series of films - late Spanish director Amando de Ossorio's Tombs Of The Blind Dead series. This entered the circle of true doom thanks to Cathedral, whose constantly evolving career frequently inspired tomorrow's trends in a genre supposedly immune to them. Fire up Doom Forever Doomed, the forum of choice for scene policing and historical revisionism, and you don't have to look hard to find people boasting about having just watched the original cut of La Noche Del Terror Ciego, or asking where they can get a copy, while mum sewson their latest silver-thread Solstice patch in the next room. Admittedly they're little knowN outside of full on dorky horror circles, but when you can get a five-disc set from Play.com, or the Region 1 five-disc set that comes in a cringeworthy brilliant coffin pack, maybe it's not worth crowing about in your underground fashion show.

"The whole purpose of Cathedral forming was to record a 7" about the Blind Dead!" agrees Moss drummer and True Doom archivist Chris Chantler, partly responsible for the lip-blistering creative drought with his own coffin-rattling jam, Tombs Of The Blind Drugged.

As with all micro-scenes dedicated to historical re-enactment, patch jacket old school death/doom concerns itself with aping the canon of a number of approved bands who can all be counted on one severed hand - Autopsy, Winter, early Asphyx, Disembowlment and the Cathedral demo that introduced these furrow-browed revisionists to films they'd place autistic emphasis on - and whose interest in the world outside of death/doom orthodoxy is limited only to one film. “We are old school new jack death/doom,” they scream, tugging on your sleeves like desperate toddlers, “we like this one film and these three bands. URGH! URGH!!!! Pls choose us to be your band of the week Fenriz!”

"That's a much more recent development," Chantler adds of the scene's fascination with those films. "I wonder if Johnny-come-lately trendies like Hooded Menace and Moss have been responsible for it becoming such a cliche. I doubt Moss would've called an EP Tombs Of The Blind... anything nowadays, it's too obvious innit?"

Finland's Hooded Menace are perhaps the single greatest modern catalyst for transforming this relatively obscure series of video nasties into a full-blown convention for death/doom, and almost as big a part of the scene as leg-askew promo photos and faded Autopsy t-shirts, with their 2007 demo The Eyeless Horde and 2008 full-length Fullfill The Curse tipping over the cart of joyless technical death metal tedium and placing raw and atmospheric deathdoom on top.

Hooded Menace: Lasse second from left.

“Well, of course we weren't doing anything new when adopting those films,” admits Hooded Menace guitarist Lasse Pyykko, “but I guess no one had embraced the subject this comprehensively. Even our band's name, the logo and the album cover art refer to the movies. It doesn't bother me too much if there are more bands inspired by the same flicks. It's rather interesting but yeah, it's often like when a certain idea gets overdone it kills some of the fun.

“The best bands will do it the most authentic way though,” he adds. “If you have internalised the feeling and are able to translate it in notes you´re doing just fine. We have already treated all the four movies of the series in our songs and on the top of that we have tracks like 'Vortex Macabre' that is inspired by The Blind Dead but not exactly based on any particular movie. I think this is the approach we can handle the subject with in the future as well. However I take it day by day and do things that I feel good about at the time. I'm not painting myself into a corner. Anyway, I don't see myself getting tired of the subject any time soon as we have always written about other movies too. If The Blind Dead became a HUGE cliché I don´t think the trend would last too long anyway. Then again how long is this band going to stick around? I don´t have a crystal ball. Who knows what the future will bring? Enough of speculation.”

The late Amando de Ossorio, and a friend.

Released in 1971, Tombs Of The Blind Dead was followed by Return Of The Blind Dead in 1973, The Ghost Galleon in 1974 and Night Of The Seagulls in 1975, all based around the hooded menace of long dead Knights Templar, staring from their empty sockets and hunting by sound. Not great films narratively, their iconic, authentically drab ghouls and baroque mythology of old school gothic horror in an era of splatter and gore, nods to Lovecraft (especially in the final film), and a soundtrack that launched a thousand doom bands with its monastic chants and eerie piano builds. It's not hard to see why Tombs... was latched onto so wholeheartedly by a community looking to combine the visceral, open-wound rawness of early death metal with the leaden atmosphere of doom.

“Our music and and the movies share similar menacing and creepy vibes, slowness and all,” agrees Pyykko. “It's a match made in heaven, or hell if you will. The first film of the Blind Dead series I saw was the weakest of the four, The Ghost Galleon. I came across it not too many years before forming Hooded Menace actually. I used to borrow lots of horror movies from my friend and The Ghost Galleon was among the stuff I took home on one occasion. Even though it´s not the best of the Blind Dead series it stood out from the bunch of films I bummed at the time.

“We could not make a song about Toxic Avenger or Evil Dead II,” he continues, adding that he loves both films. “We're not here to crack jokes. However we are not taking it too seriously either of course. There must be a certain amount of foreboding, creepy and rugged atmosphere in the film to make it a Hooded Menace song. A little bit of grace in the mix too. It's a bit hard to put in words.”

Machetazo: Dopi centre.

Hooded Menace are just one of a handful of scattered artists who saw something they could use in these films, perhaps even something that called out to them. But if they inspired a community who adopted the same source material for all the wrong reasons, one tribe dedicated to horror movies in a very big and very right way is Spain's death metal and goregrind underground, in which the country's vast output of trashy and exploitative horror in the '70s and '80s is fertile territory for bands. Machetazo, the fathers of the scene, evolved from straight up Carcass-inspired gurgle into more atmospheric prehistoric death metal for listening to naked in churchyards, and while they have an entire LP dedicated to Amando de Ossorio, 2005's Sinfonías Del Terror Ciego, but in making up only one of many horror references in their canon, the effect is very much different.

"I don't know what to say about the Blind Dead 'cliché'," despairs Machetazo vocalist Dopi Diablo, "obviously I understand what you mean, nobody gave a fuck about those movies when we made the Sinfonias Del Terror Ciego album and now I see the Blind Dead in every fuckin' cover."

Although dying the same year as Italian eyeball-piercer Lucio Fulci, Amando de Ossorio never achieved the same level of feverish fan worship as Fulci, or even that of his countrymen like the innard-tugging, supremely crass Jess Franco. It feels mean spirited to begrudge his work any sort of afterlife, because he certainly deserves it. Perhaps then, the problem is that he deserves better.