Night of the Seagulls (1975)
- Andrew Smith
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
Plot
For seven nights every seven years, the Templar Knights rise from the dead to claim their sacrificial offerings from a fishing village in return for the safety of the rest of the townspeople. When a new doctor and his wife move to the village, they are ignored by the locals. But when night falls, an eerie distant bell rings and a flock of seagulls hovers around the beach at midnight, the doctor and his wife stumble upon the secret the villagers have.
Review
The brainchild of Spanish director Amando de Ossorio, The Blind Dead series was a cult favourite amongst horror lovers, and which gave fans of George A. Romero’s zombie films something a little different to chew on. By 1975, the series was coming to an end with this fourth instalment. You’d think that by the fourth films in horror franchises, the premises are wearing thin and that quality has dipped significantly, usually spelling the end of the series at that particular point in time – think Hellraiser: Bloodline which ended up sending the series to straight-to-video hell, or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Next Generation which killed off the Sawyer clan until their big budget reboot in the Noughties. But there are plenty of number fours which offered something more than the other sequels – Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is often heralded as the best of the series, Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers was a solid slasher and Bride of Chucky gave the killer doll a new lease of life with a main squeeze to hang with. The curse of being number four in a series wasn't always bad.
Its nice to see that the final instalment in The Blind Dead series, Night of the Seagulls, once again pulls out the stops to create a moody, effective piece which sends the deadly Templar Knights off on a high. It's briskly paced with quite a lean running time and once again assumes that the viewer hasn't seen any of the other films by reworking the origins of the Knights so that, although it's the third sequel, it's almost a standalone remake more akin to something like The Wicker Man that it is following in the franchise’s legacy. However, disappointingly the film adds nothing of real note to the series though and just slaps together its trademarks of gore, nudity and a truly haunting atmosphere with a rather flimsy story which doesn't do the Templars justice at all and gives them little reason to be in the film. The Templars aren't on screen for that long and the residents of the fishing village have become the villains of the piece here, acting as generic horror film locals who fear outsiders and cast them aside (you know the type: The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, etc.). These townspeople are a rural, deeply isolated group that survives the decay of their local economy by literally consuming outsiders. The horror isn't just the zombie knights; it's the complicity of the entire town participating in the madness by feeding them to the meat grinder so they can keep their status quo intact.
However, when the Templars do appear, they are once again the highlight of the film. They look as crusty and decomposed as always which really ups their creepy factor. You never believe for a moment that these are simply men in costumes - they are zombie knights looking for blood. Their whole aura is awesome - right from the sounds that they make to the slow, lumbering way they turn and just the whole sense that you can't escape them despite their obviously limited speed. They are relentless and though you might outrun them temporarily, they just keep coming because they have all of the time in the world - you don’t! They are truly unique horror creations and it's a real pity that they haven't become as iconic or famous as Romero's zombie hordes. Sadly, what made their so original to begin with was hunting via sound but The Ghost Galleon and now this one have both stripped that distinguishing feature away, leaving them as just generic lumbering zombies.
Writing the zombies as purely hunting by sound is free, but filming it, however, is incredibly resource intensive. If you think about the mechanics of staging a scene where monsters hunt purely by sound, you have to build elaborate suspense sequences based on absolute silence. That requires meticulous, expensive sound design. It requires careful blocking and choreography from your actors to avoid making noise. And it requires a director capable of sustaining tension for long periods without any action which de Ossorio had done so perfectly in the past. But now the films were being made cheaper and with a tight production schedule, so corners were cut and this type of sequence couldn't be done anymore. They needed to go straight for the jugular this time out. They also relied heavily on stock footage pulled directly from the first film, which is like the ultimate budget safety mechanism, but it’s disappointing to rewatch a film you’ve already seen before!
As I've already said, one of the trademarks of this series is atmosphere and Night of the Seagulls reeks of it. There are plenty of slow-motion scenes of them riding on horseback along the beach in pursuit of their nubile virgin sacrifices. The return of the horses is crucial to the specific aura of The Blind Dead series, sorely lacking from the previous film, because there's a grand, almost mythic quality to undead knights riding slowly along a shoreline. It elevates them from generic zombies to something resembling, like, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. There is an incredible dream-like quality of these sequences, which is largely down to the day-for-night shooting. Shooting at night is expensive as you need massive lighting rigs just to see anything on camera. So low budget filmmakers often shoot during the middle of the day and then severely underexpose the film, slapping a heavy blue filter over the lens to simulate moonlight. It looks incredibly cheesy but here, because of the specific environment, it creates this stunning, surreal contrast. There are the stark, blown-out white sands of the beach, contrasting with the pitch-black robes of the complicit villagers who are just waiting on the shore. And then these crusty, lumbering Templar knights emerge from the surf. It creates this visual tableau that feels completely untethered from reality. Added to that, the idea that the souls of the sacrificed virgins are trapped in the seagulls hovering around the beach at midnight is haunting.
The most expensive elements of the previous films were the Templar fight scenes and the practical effects - both are incredibly sparse here. The Templars aren't even on screen for very long. Night of the Seagulls cuts down on the gore and nudity from the previous films. de Ossorio couldn't rely on cheap action scenes or elaborate gore set pieces because he literally couldn't afford them. So they had to lean entirely on mood, suspense, and that haunting cinematography. Whilst a horror film can go so long on this, it needs a visceral punch to make it all worthwhile. Though it does take a while to going thanks to the mood building, the pay-off is worth the wait though not as powerful as previous instalments. There is the usual effective siege sequence where the Templars surround and then break into a house before fighting with the survivors inside, skeletal hands emerging from behind doorframes being one of de Ossorio’s trademark shots. But the sequence needs to be longer and more exciting considering the slower build-up.
Final Verdict
Night of the Seagulls is a strong final showing for the Templar Knights. It's a brooding horror flick which delivers the goods with both jumpy visual shocks and more spine-tingling moments. Although not a patch on the original couple of films, it's still a quality sequel to a series which really does deserve a lot more respect and fame than it gets. There is just something so ethereal and unnerving about those zombies that makes them infinitely more terrifying than the majority of English-speaking horror films have produced, even if this is one of their lesser efforts.
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Night of the Seagulls Director(s): Amando de Assorio Writer(s): Amando de Assorio (screenplay) Actor(s): Víctor Petit, María Kosty, Sandra Mozarowsky, Jan Antonio Calvo, Julie James, Javier de Rivera, Pilar Vela, Fernando Villena Duration: 89 mins |  |
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