Henry Lincoln's Classic Documentary: The Shadow of the Templars (1979) 📽️

With an all-new introduction and closing commentary by filmmaker Henry Lincoln. Almost 50 years later, the original televised documentary introducing the world to the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, the coded church of Bérenger Saunière, and the enigma that inspired "The Da Vinci Code".

In 1968, Henry Lincoln stumbled across a book about the priest of a small village who supposedly discovered a great treasure. "The Accursed Treasure" written by Gérard de Sède was inspired by information provided by Pierre Plantard and contained hidden codes and messages which immediately piqued Lincoln's interest.

As a writer of film scripts, he began researching the story and in 1971 made his first film on the subject, "The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem?" Two other films followed - "The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil" in 1974 and "The Shadow of the Templars" in 1979. Together, these Chronicle films provide the first glimpse available to the English-speaking world of the mystery of Rennes-le-Château.

Inspired by the enigma, which was rapidly becoming a phenomenon, Lincoln went on to publish the 1982 best-seller "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. The non-fiction title followed research through the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, and the Merovingian kings of France, finally proposing the hypothesis that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. In 2003, Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" popularized and fictionalized Lincoln's research for a worldwide audience.