What It’s About: Vacationers make the mistake of ignoring local warnings and discover why they were told to avoid the area: it is home to undead Knights Templar, executed and blinded for their unholy crimes.
Why Watch it Today?: The Knights Templar were arrested en masse today in 1307, and tortured to admit to crimes including heresy, “obscene kissing”, cannibalism, roasting babies and worshipping cats and three-headed idols in secret night-time rituals (crimes which the Catholic Church officially absolved them of 700 years later). Spanish writer/producer/director Amando de Ossorio drew upon the stories of the Templars crimes for his most popular work, the Blind Dead series, which combines the tail end of the 1960s Gothic Horror cycle with a modern setting and the post-Night of the Living Dead boom in zombie films to create a distinctive series featuring horse riding, blind, sword-wielding, blood drinking knight “zombies”.
Other Choices: Return of the Blind Dead
The League of Dead Films 
distributed by aip—which turned down the real NIGHT OF LIVING DEAD, cause of its unhappy ending.
and the knights templar got a bum rap—typical roman catholic church bad mouthing them in order to take away the fortune the templars had amassed.
I usually link to an actual discussion of events that happened on this day for a good reason: this is not a history blog. Yes, it is generally agreed that the charges against the Templars were an excuse to seize their considerable property and break their power; but regardless of the truth of the charges, they did inspire fiction, and this film. Unfortunately the current link is bad so I’ll need to update it.
I imagine A.I.P. learned a lot about the value of horror with bleak endings from that poor decision.