Fantaterror

Spain's horror cycle, roughly 1968 to 1976, produced under a dictatorship that had spent thirty years banning almost exactly this.

The clothed and unclothed versions

Spanish censorship under Franco was severe, and the workaround became standard practice. Producers shot two versions of the same film: a chaste cut for domestic release, and an export cut with nudity and additional violence for France, Italy and Germany.

This is why the Spanish films of this period exist in so many conflicting edits, and why a title can run 82 minutes in one territory and 97 in another with entirely different scenes.

Paul Naschy

Jacinto Molina Álvarez, working as Paul Naschy, is the cycle. A former weightlifter who wrote most of his own scripts, he played the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky in twelve films across four decades, along with Dracula, the Mummy, a hunchback and Jack the Ripper. He was consciously reconstructing the Universal monster cycle in a country that had never been allowed one.

The Blind Dead

Amando de Ossorio's four films, beginning with Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972), are the cycle's best invention. Executed Templar knights rise from a ruined monastery: eyeless, rotted, riding skeletal horses, hunting by sound. They move in extreme slow motion, which should not be frightening and is.

De Ossorio insisted they were not zombies. Everyone else disagreed.

After Franco

Franco died in November 1975. Censorship was dismantled over the following two years, and the entire commercial logic collapsed with it. Spanish producers no longer needed horror as a cover for nudity, and moved to explicit content directly. The boom was over by 1977.

Where to start

Tombs of the Blind Dead.