Drupal 7 .htaccess issue

Good Afternoon my *nix friends.

I am having a issue with my Drupal site and the FilesMatch directive I use to deny access to certain core directories and files.

It seems that when I use the below code in my .htaccess file, my entire website throws a HTTP 500 error, which clearly is not the desire effect at all.

any input would be quite helpful, as I am getting stuck and frustrated.

Thanks!

<FilesMatch "\.(engine|inc|info|install|make|module|profile|test|po|sh|.*sql|theme|tpl(\.php)?|xtmpl)$|^(\..*|Entries.*|Repository|Root|Tag|Template)$">
 Order allow,deny
 Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

to fix this, I ended up creating a drupal.conf file in Apache and loading it up there. And it worked, I think there is a misconfiguration that wasn't allowing .htaccess to execute, but all the proper AllowOverrides were set. I dunno.

thanks for your help though.