GUIDE | CORE HORROR

Cemetery Man aka
Dellamorte Dellamore

(Michele Soavi, Italy/France, 1994)

BY LAURA WYNNE | October 17, 2024
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Directors love Magritte. William Friedkin modeled the iconic Exorcist streetlight image after the painting Empire of Light. Director Michele Soavi was inspired by the shrouded kiss depicted in The Lovers II for his 1994 film Dellamorte Dellamore (translation: Of Death, Of Love). It’s a stirring, romantic work, and this kiss is the first swerve away from genre in a movie that will be so much more than the Italian zombie trash it appears to be. The film is often compared to Fellini, not just because of its surreal nature (the way it depicts the same woman appearing over and over again recalls not just Fellini but Buñuel). It’s such a contrast because it arrives in a highly derivative (and cheap) era of Italian horror. This was a movie aware of fine art, literature, comics, and music, and had bigger questions hounding it. Dellamorte Dellamore is haunted by what it means to live, to love, to be a man or a woman, what it is to work, to fuck, to die. It tries to contain the whole of life—an impossible task. In some ways, it functions as a masculine companion to Sally Potter’s 1992 adaptation of Orlando.

The anglicized title of Cemetery Man even recalls The Smiths, with the film’s entire aesthetic of ennui, existential dread, detourned religious imagery, casual murder, loneliness, and mordant humor. Like Morrissey, the film’s star, Rupert Everett, was a gay icon in the mid-’80s. Unlike Morrissey, Everett came out in ’89. Even so, he dated Béatrice Dalle—obsessively loving a glamorous woman is an insanely gay thing to do, and anyone who says different has never seen a Tom Ford movie. It’s all so Catholic. The many scenes where he is overwhelmed by the beauty of the newly widowed woman played by Anna Falchi (compounded by the rapt way Soavi’s camera photographs her nude body) are so cinematic—outside of Wong Kar Wai, there aren’t many films of the ’90s that have the romantic charge of the two lighting their cigarettes at the same time.

Cemetery Man was one of the first casting coups of the comic-book-movie era. Everett’s graveyard caretaker Francesco Dellamorte tasked with re-killing the dead is drawn from Tiziano Sclavi’s Dylan Dog comics and the Dellamorte novel—and he had directly based his supernatural hero on Everett, who attributed his rising star in Italy to the popularity of the character. It would be like if Sting had played John Constantine.

Everett claimed he lived as a woman as an adolescent and has since said some vaguely transphobic statements that mostly just make him sound middle-aged and British. One of the most vital moments in the movie is when Francesco, so desperate for the love of a woman, tries to castrate himself to prove himself to her and a squeamish doctor injects him with a massive syringe of estrogen to curb his libido. “It lasts for over a month.” He still makes love to another version of Falchi, this time a prostitute. There aren’t many movies about the difficulties fucking while you’re on estrogen…

After Francesco sees the specter of the grim reaper who tells him, “Stop killing the dead, kill the living,” he listens. The morality slips… It’s very Italian, being so tired of everything that mass murder isn’t a lapse of judgment but a plea of desperation. He kills the prostitute and her roommates by burning them to death, then goes on a spree headshotting biker gangs and hospital staff alike. This doesn’t change anything, and he decides to flee his town altogether, learning that the outside world may as well not exist. As Godard described his 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, this film contains the entire world. Horror films often reach for the uncanny, the great emptiness at the heart of things. Instead, Soavi reaches for infinity. His hero left standing, looking down on the edge of his entire life.

As the mayor burying his teenage daughter says to Francesco, foreshadowing the somber teenage lyrics of the next generation: “We were born to die.” 🩸

LAURA WYNNE

is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn.

X: @cronenbabe

How to see Cemetery Man aka Dellamorte Dellamore

The film is also available on various DVD and Blu-ray editions.
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