In the archives of cinema, there exists a curiosity known as ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’, or (expectedly for North America) by its more prosaic title ‘Cemetery Man.’
The linguistic shape-shifting, a peculiar marriage of marketing and mistranslation, is but the first of many complexities surrounding this multilayered work of art. We explore the film on its 30th anniversary.
The film, a creation of the auteur Michele Soavi, defies simple classification, much like the infinite variations of text in ‘The Library of Babel’ represent every possible combination of letters creating an unimaginable array of meaningful and meaningless copy. It simultaneously inhabits and transcends the realms of horror, comedy, and meditation. Casually observed, it may appear as merely another entry in the pantheon of Italian horror, yet a closer look reveals layers of meaning as complex and interconnected as the web of time itself.
The film opens with a superb long shot (below) accompanied by one of the most beautiful soundtracks in cinema by the matchless Manuel De Sica. It is an instant ride into a languid and haunting world that Soavi layers, inviting a crossing into a place where the boundaries between life and death, love and loss, reality and fantasy blur into elusive ambiguity.
The camera work, at once detached and intimate, contains within it the essence of the entire narrative to follow. It is a microcosm of the film’s universe, a snow globe of visual mastery that encapsulates the themes of isolation, beauty amidst decay, and the cyclical nature of existence that are about to unfold. We are slowly subsumed into a labyrinth where each turn may lead to revelation or despair, often simultaneously.
In ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’, the horror genre serves as a conduit for exploring the eternal feminine ( as defined by Goethe) in its multifaceted psychological struggles. For the female protagonist this internal conflict encompasses guilt stemming from infidelity, from the memory of her dead spouse to an intrinsic trepidation towards phallocentric sexuality, and masochistic inclinations inextricably linked to the Freudian concept of the death drive.
Conversely, for the eternal masculine, the ubiquitous presence of the undead symbolizes a deep-seated fear of the archetypal femme fatale. Additionally, it manifests in the male protagonist’s persistent feelings of inadequacy when juxtaposed with more mature male figures, as well as his gradual descent into a miasma of cynicism and existential ennui. This psychological deterioration coincides with the erosion of his convictions regarding love’s transcendent power and the possibility of immortality.
Here is the protagonist Dellamorte, a name that echoes both death and love, much like the duality of the film itself. His patronymic, Dellamorte, juxtaposed with his maternal lineage’s appellation, Dellamore, renders him an embodiment of the intricate confluence between amor and mors – love and death.
This dichotomy serves as a microcosm for the film’s overarching thematic exploration. It explores the nuanced interplay between mortality and desire, the corporeal and the sepulchral.
At the heart of this narrative labyrinth stands Francesco Dellamorte, the keeper of Buffalora’s cemetery, portrayed with stormy romanticism by Rupert Everett*. He is a liminal figure straddling the worlds of the living and the dead. In his chthonic kingdom, the recently interred – the returners – have developed a troubling propensity for resurrection, a phenomenon Dellamorte addresses with grim pragmatism and well-aimed bullets.
Dellamorte is accompanied by Gnaghi, a creature both monstrous and innocent, whose very existence challenges our notions of humanity. With his child-like mind encased in a a bulbous and drooling visage, Gnaghi serves as both foil and mirror to Dellamorte’s aquiline features and brooding intellect. The duo, reminiscent of Polyphemus and Odysseus, navigate a landscape where the boundaries between life and death, love and loss, are as permeable as the soil of their cemetery.
The narrative also introduces a tripartite feminine presence, embodied by the beautiful Anna Falchi, and identified only as ‘Lei’ (she). This triptych of womanhood—widow, bureaucrat, courtesan—serves as a Jungian archetype of the feminine, simultaneously desired and unattainable. Each incarnation of ‘Lei’ represents a facet of Dellamorte’s psycho-sexual anxieties, externalizing his internal conflict between carnal longing and existential dread, pushing him further into the embrace of his namesake, Death.
The cinematic tale woven by Soavi draws upon a rich palette of influences, from the chiaroscuro of Italian horror maestros to the surrealist visions of Leonora Carrington. Soavi’s directorial vision eschews the bright, delineated aesthetic often associated with comic book adaptations. Instead, he crafts a visual language that owes as much to the Romantic painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries as it does to the stark monochrome of the Dylan Dog comics. This approach yields a cinematic experience suffused with a languid, permanently crepuscular richness—a quality perfectly encapsulated in the film’s poetic title. This intertextual approach creates a world that is at once familiar and utterly alien, a semiotic puzzle box that invites—demands—multiple interpretations.
The film’s origin is rooted in the popular Italian comic book series ‘Dylan Dog’, a rare authentic phenomenon in a cultural landscape often dominated by American imports. Created by the reclusive Tiziano Sclavi in 1986, Dylan Dog—an ‘investigator of nightmares’ whose nomenclature pays homage to the Welsh bard Dylan Thomas—embodies a peculiarly Italian brand of world-weary antiheroism and existential malaise.
The opening credits unfold over an elaborate snow globe, a microcosm containing two diminutive figures poised on the precipice of a cliff. This image serves as a mise-en-abyme for the film itself—a self-contained universe in which chronology loses all meaning, the living and the dead intermingle freely, and hope and loss exist in symbiotic harmony. It is a world where one woman can be three and three can be one, where no personality remains immutable.
The narrative structure of ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ defies linear convention, presenting instead a series of episodic vignettes that are more akin to the circular nature of Calvino’s tales than with traditional horror films. Dellamorte’s encounters with the undead, his Sisyphean struggles against bureaucratic indifference, his ill-fated romantic pursuits, and his metaphysical dialogues with Death form a journey through a landscape of the absurd. These episodes, disparate as they may seem, are bound together by the twin threads of Eros and Thanatos that run through all of human existence.
In one moment, we find Dellamorte dispatching the undead with grim efficiency; in the next, he spars with local functionaries who refuse to acknowledge the supernatural crisis unfolding in their midst. The film shifts tone with the fluidity of a dream, moving from grim humor to ostentatious violence to perverse sensuality, all while maintaining a delicate ambiguity about the nature of its internal world.
Death himself materializes from the swirling embers of a bonfire. A pack of zombified boy scouts, their once-pristine uniforms now tattered , descend upon our protagonists with a ferocity that belies their former innocence.
Soavi maintains a delicate ambiguity regarding the ontological status of Buffalora and its inhabitants. What really is happening in its cemetery? Are the dead truly rising, or is this all an elaborate metaphor for the human condition? Or is the cemetery keeper himself unraveling? Is the office of Dellamorte’s civil servant friend Franco just a maze of papers and folders, or metaphor for Minotaur’s labyrinth?
Or perhaps we must consider the possibility that we too are but characters in someone else’s dream?
If the film’s ‘episodes’ fail to coalesce into a cohesive narrative whole, it is perhaps by design. The cinematic language of Italian horror has long privileged atmosphere and imagery over strict narrative logic, and ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ elevates this tendency to an art form. The connective tissue binding these disparate scenes is not plot, but rather the omnipresent themes of carnality and mortality—the carnal and the funereal, if you will.
As we approach the end of the film, Dellamorte and Gnaghi find themselves at the edge of their known world, facing an abyss that may lead to oblivion or to yet another iteration of their cyclical existence. This moment, captured within the confines of the snow globe, suggests that all we have witnessed may be but one possibility in an infinite series of potential realities, much like the branching realities in Borges’ ‘The Garden Of Forking Paths’.
We are confronted with the ultimate expression of the film’s central conceit: a closed universe in which time does not exist, and the beautiful and the grotesque are inextricably intertwined.
‘Dellamorte Dellamore’’s seeming lack of linear progression also mirrors the cyclical nature of life and death as the thematic core of the film. Each vignette serves to deepen our understanding of Dellamorte’s psychological landscape and the bizarre reality of Buffalora. The sequence in which Dellamorte is chastised by Death himself for the presumption of killing the already dead. This moment of metaphysical absurdity encapsulates the film’s central paradox: in a world where the boundary between life and death has become permeable, what meaning can these states truly hold? Dellamorte’s subsequent decision to begin murdering the living as well becomes not an act of madness, but a logical extension of his existential crisis.
The film stands as a testament to cinema’s power to create worlds that are at once absurd and beautiful, horrific and romantic.
It is a work that, like Borges’ ‘The Aleph’, contains within itself all possible films – a point in space that contains all other points. It is a world that resists facile interpretation and invites repeated viewing, each iteration revealing new layers of meaning and symbolism.
The film’s treatment of sexuality is equally complex and multifaceted. Each incarnation of ‘Lei’ represents a different aspect of feminine sexuality as filtered through Dellamorte’s increasingly warped psyche. The widow intensifies his feelings of inadequacy by comparing him unfavorably to her deceased husband. The mayor’s assistant, with her pathological fear of male genitalia, drives him to contemplate self-mutilation. The prostitute, by reducing sex to a mere transaction, provokes in him a rage that borders on the incendiary.
These encounters, far from being mere titillation or shock value, serve to deconstruct societal notions of masculinity and sexual prowess. Dellamorte’s inability to form a lasting connection with any of these women speaks to a deeper alienation, a fundamental disconnect between his inner world and the external reality of Buffalora.
The relationship between Gnaghi and the mayor’s daughter, Valentina, provides a grotesque mirror to Dellamorte’s romantic travails. Their love, consummated only after Valentina’s decapitation in a motorcycle accident, serves as a darkly comic reminder that in the world of ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’, even death is not an impediment to desire.
At every iteration, Soavi’s camera transforms the mundane into the mythic.Through the tonal palette of the film he shifts with mercurial swiftness between mordant humor, ostentatious violence, and perverse sensuality. Buffalora exists in a state of perpetual flux, constantly shaken by forces beyond its inhabitants’ control.
Ultimately, ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ invites us to contemplate the thin membrane separating life from death, love from loss, sanity from madness. It is a cinematic Rorschach test, reflecting back to each viewer their own preoccupations and anxieties about mortality and desire. In Soavi’s hands, the cemetery becomes not merely a place of endings, but a fertile ground for new beginnings, where each death contains the seed of rebirth, and where love, in all its perverse and beautiful forms, refuses to die.
Original Soundtrack by: Riccardo Biseo & Manuel De Sica
Screenplay by: Tiziano Sclavi & Gianni Romoli
Cinematography by: Mauro Marchetti
*The casting of Rupert Everett in the role of Dellamorte is a masterful stroke of meta-textual resonance. Sclavi’s original directive for Dylan Dog’s appearance—”Like Rupert Everett”—finds its ultimate realization in this celluloid incarnation.