Sometimes They Return: Cemetery Man

Certain films make such a strong impression that even if you love them, you are rarely drawn to re-watch. It just seems better to sit with the first feeling they gave you – you don’t want a subsequent viewing to rob you of the memory of how they affected you. And sometimes, on top of that, a given film is just hard to find on streaming, even if you wanted to check it out again, such that your remembered first viewing grows in stature over the years: it becomes something treasured, almost mythic, a half glimpsed moment of true magic from long, long ago.

Such it was with today’s film, Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (1994). I’ve previously written on this blog about how I first saw it way back when: In high school, a good friend and I wanted to go see a movie, picked up the local newspaper to see what was playing (as one used to do), and saw a listing for a film with no description, but just an intriguing title. We went to the cinema and there was no poster, and the nameplate outside of the screening room was just sharpie scrawled on an index card. We bought two tickets and assumed we were in for something cheap and terrible, and when we went in, found that we were the only ones in attendance. We figured that with no one else around, we could just crack jokes at something that would be ‘so bad it’s good’ and settled in for a laugh. The film started, and we made a couple of early comments and then quickly shut up – because it was kind of amazing.

Poetic, absurd, artful, and successfully, intentionally funny, this was an unexpected gem, and one of the best cinema experiences I’ve ever had. We’d gone in completely cold, expecting the absolute worst, and were rather blown away by this peculiar Italian horror-comedy that was in turns silly, sexy, dark, and disturbing, with moments of grotesquerie both delightful and off-putting, not to mention a surprising depth and shades of existential profundity. I loved it. And I spent years carrying this memory, especially because in the streaming era, it was really hard to locate. Finally, after about 30 years, Severin restored and released the film on 4K and a clear, crisp print showed up on Shudder that did justice to its craft and artistry, so I was stoked to finally take it in again, and I knew it would be worth writing about. And it was, but not only for the reasons I’d counted on.

Rather, I suppose this is a case of something like “you should never meet your heroes” or maybe “you can never go home again” or some other such pat life advice, as my experience of re-viewing was not quite what I’d hoped for – there were still things to appreciate, but what had so impressed me thirty years ago, didn’t quite do it for me now. There were even elements that actively turned me off. I spent some time thinking about it, and then decided to watch it one more time, and happily then found myself enjoying it much more again. Interesting…

And so that is what I want to write about today – not just the film itself, but how and why it clicked for me so well in the mid-90s, how and why it didn’t when I first re-watched it last week, and what finally, on a third viewing, I found I could still love in it regardless of what could be viewed as significant issues. No matter what, it is clearly a unique piece of work, worthy of appreciation and consideration. So let’s get into it. There’s no way to do this adequately sans spoilers, so you’ve been warned…

Cemetery Man (1994) (A.K.A. Dellamorte Dellamore)

Michele Soavi has been mentioned a couple times on this blog before. He was an assistant to Dario Argento and worked with a bunch of other big names in the Italian horror industry in the 80s. You can find him on screen in such masterpieces as Lucio Fulci’s The City of the Living Dead  (1980) or Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985), and of course, his feature directorial debut was one of my favorite slashers of the 80s, the stylish, if sometimes delightfully ridiculous Stagefright (1987) (the killer in the owl mask; Marilyn Monroe playing the sax; the cat jump scare in the back of a car (how did it even get in there?); the theatre director who’s an absolute asshole, but you sympathize with him cause you can see how he can see just how terrible his show is, and he is trying to fix it and can’t, and it just really stings – I love it all!). By 1994, Soave had a few films under his belt and took on this ambitious adaptation of a novel by Tiziano Sclavi, Dellamorte Dellamore, Sclavi being quite well known at the time in Italy for his surreal horror comic, Dylan Dog.

Originally released with the same title as the novel, Cemetery Man follows a worker at a cemetery in a small town in Italy, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) and his nonverbal, simpleminded assistant, Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), as they go about their duties: digging and cleaning graves, changing flowers, and most importantly, shooting in the head the zombies that tend to rise within a week of their original burial. Theirs is an absurd, repetitive, dreary existence and the ennui is strong with them. Dellamorte dispatches the undead that surround him with little more than a shrug and a sigh. And outside the gates of the cemetery, things are little better. The town, Buffalora, beyond the borders of which, he has never ventured, is small, venal, frustratingly bureaucratic and corrupt, with the mayor unconcerned about the dead rising as long as it doesn’t interrupt his campaign for reelection.

Things change for Dellamorte when he sees a beautiful widow (Anna Falchi) attending the funeral of her husband and he immediately falls in love with her. After taking her to visit the cemetery’s ossuary, she is so overcome with passion by the assembled skulls and bones that she also falls for him. They kiss like in a Magritte painting and proceed to have sex on the grave of her beloved husband, who rises and bites her, seemingly leading to her death. Dellamorte keeps her body under watch and when she rises, he shoots her, as is his job. But she just keeps coming back. One night, she returns as a seductive zombie, drawing him to her and sexily taking a chomp out of his shoulder before Gnaghi plants a shovel in her head. Later, she seems to return as the new mayor’s (the other one had died before the election) assistant, who already knows and loves Dellamorte, though she’s never before been to Buffalora or met him. They have a short lived romance, dependent on her belief that he’s impotent, as she has a fear of sex – he has himself chemically castrated, only for her to get over said fear and leave him for the mayor (in a problematic turn of events that we’ll get into later). And finally, she appears as a university student that Dellamorte goes home with. She also tells him that she loves him, but he soon discovers that she is a prostitute and that declaration just made the evening more expensive.

Along the way, Dellamorte goes down a dark path, sliding from a state of poetic melancholy at the beginning, through various romantic ups and downs, not to mention social indignities, to cold blooded acts of murder – some funny, some satisfying, and at least one quite disturbing. He has conversations with Death who tells him to stop killing the dead and that if he doesn’t want people to rise, to go shoot the living in the head to ensure that they won’t. This he does, beginning a vein in the film reminiscent of Kafka or Ionesco wherein it seems impossible for him to be caught, impossible for him to retain responsibility for his own acts, no matter how he tries – the police inspector will never see him for who he is and his crimes are stolen from him. The romantic gloom of the first half of the film is supplanted with an existential hopelessness – nothing has meaning: not life, not death, not love, not sex, not murder. Finally, he and Gnaghi drive away from Buffalora only to learn, as suspected, that there is no world beyond its borders – they are trapped within a snow globe – beautiful and pointless. In an odd turn, Dellamorte and Gnaghi exchange roles, Gnaghi now speaking and Dellamorte responding with Gnaghi’s characteristic grunt, and the film ends – they will return, events will play out again – perhaps a new iteration thereof, but with no meaningful change – nothing ever could.

You could imagine how this impressed me at 16. It is a weird movie to say the least, but one with a wealth of concepts, moods, and images. I’m sure I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but the philosophical vibe washed over me and left me intrigued, puzzled, entertained, and tickled with the idiosyncratic peculiarity of it all.

Plus, it must be said that it is beautiful to look at and also really quite funny, with loads of memorable details: the bus full of scouts that drive off a cliff and of course return as zombies, one of which keeps rubbing sticks between his hands menacingly as if to start an undead campfire, the sex dripping from Anna Falchi’s seductive line, “you know, you’ve got a real nice ossuary,” the scene when Gnaghi, so infatuated with the mayor’s daughter, vomits on her right before her boyfriend shows up on his motorcycle – she exclaims, “he threw up on me,” and the boyfriend responds, “cool – new fad” before she jumps on behind him and they ride away, unconcerned with the regurgitated bile between them, and of course, the sweet, child-like romance Gnaghi later has with her decapitated, reanimated head after she dies in a motorcycle accident. And again, beyond the comedy, I just loved the gory absurdity of it all, the morbid, poetic existentialism found in what I’d expected to be little more than cheap, b-movie detritus.

Thirty Years Later

Everything I’ve written above sounds great, and all of that is there to be found in the film, but that said, I did find myself sadly unsatisfied on the re-watch. First of all, things that had felt deep to me as a teenager, philosophically rich and ghoulishly beautiful, at 45, just seemed, I don’t know, facile? Shallow? Obvious? I didn’t come away feeling like this all revealed some truths of the human condition – but rather, it seemed more than a bit pretentious.

But all of that is fine. I mean it is an unfair standard to expect every film to reveal some profound truth of what it is to be human – that is a pretty high bar, and I wouldn’t judge any other film for not clearing it, and Soavi’s film genuinely deserves credit for actually approaching such an ambitious artistic feat. What really was difficult the second time around was how the philosophical-ness and poetic-ness felt not only slight, but actually ugly when it came to women, or rather, the woman, or even just “She,” which is as far as the film goes in naming Anna Falchi’s embodiment of feminine, sexy, mysterious, eternally unattainable woman-ness.

Dellamorte seems to have no other reason for falling in love with her than that she is beautiful, and she seems to have no reason to fall in love with him except the dictates of the story (to be fair, Rupert Everett is a very attractive man, but her attraction feels more like narrative convenience). While her perpetual return is intriguing, something about it feels uncomfortable: in Dellamorte’s story, there is one woman, without a name, who is all women, who is everywhere, whom he loves, whom he obsesses over, whom he doesn’t really know, and whom he can never truly have – she will always slip away from him, be taken from him; she is a failed promise, a lie, a tease. Life allows no such satisfaction – she exists (occasionally) only to be desired, to be longed for, but she seems to lack essence. She is an empty ideal – not a person – not a character.

And it does get pretty dark. I wrote above of the second half of the film when Dellamorte goes on a bit of an existential killing spree. Much of that is enjoyable – we see him killing people we’d earlier seen be jerks, or we see him kill dispassionately, because nothing matters anyway, but there is one time that he kills emotionally. Late in the film, drunk and despondent after being rejected by the most recent incarnation of “She” (the Mayor’s assistant), Dellamorte is approached by two young, attractive women in a tavern, one of whom is the next incarnation of the object of his desire. He goes home with them, is told that “She” loves him, and proceeds to make love to her. When he discovers that they are prostitutes and that he must pay extra for her declaration of affection, he puts a space heater in her bed, starting a fire that burns their apartment to cinders with them (and one other girl) inside.

It all feels like a Trojan Horse – Rupert Everett has brought so much charm and weary resignation to the role, and we have happily gone along with him on a dark, blackly comic, sweetly grotesque ride, only to end up in this ugly sequence of incel violence – a bitter man, denied the love he feels he deserves, feeling lied to and cheated, murders three young women because his feelings got hurt. It lands like a sucker punch.

Add to that the storyline of the mayor’s assistant (she is initially terrified by sex and feels free to love Dellamorte because the word around town is that he’s impotent (which he’s not) – he goes to a doctor and gets chemically castrated so they can be married – and then she turns up and explains that the mayor has raped her, curing her of her phobia, and she’s now going to marry him instead – you know, a totally normal, realistic reaction for an actual human female), and it’s hard to say that the movie doesn’t feel more than a little misogynistic. Somehow, as a 16 year old boy, so enamored of the glorious weirdness on display, I’d just failed to pick up on it.

Is this a case of changing social mores in the last 30 years (we are certainly more aware and less tolerating of elements of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and such these days) or is it just that I’ve grown up some and now find myself turned off by elements that I must admit I didn’t think about when I was a kid and first watched this movie? Whatever it is, it did sour me a bit on the film this time around.

But Let’s Give It Another Chance, Huh?

For all of the criticisms of the last section, I don’t want to come down too hard on the film (or on my teenage self). In spite of my reservations, there was still a great deal that I enjoyed and appreciated, and I thought I should give it one more try. And I’m glad I did. The first time I saw it, I had no expectations or even had negative ones and was so happily surprised. The second time, I was carrying the nostalgia of that first impression and it was a cold splash of water in the face to confront some problematic elements. And so, I wanted to approach it a third time, more cognizant and clear eyed of what I was going to see.

And I’m happy to report that I kinda loved it again. My criticisms stand – I don’t think there’s much of a way to get around them, but maybe even the most troubling elements can be an important part of the whole. Maybe the point is that the “love” between “She” and Dellamorte is a superficial fantasy – an illusory preoccupation to create a sense of meaning in a clearly meaningless existence. The degree to which She isn’t really a character is just the most prominent example of something that may be true of all of the other secondary players besides Dellamorte and Gnaghi. The degree to which the only significant female character is reduced to a symbol feels disappointing at the very least, but we don’t have to read it as being about gender – she is just the only other “real thing” in Dellamorte’s existence and she isn’t even real either. Nothing in life or death is.

When he murders her (as the college student) and her friends, it feels ugly, but this is a horror movie, after all, and perhaps this moment just brings the weight we should feel regarding all of his murders, but for whatever reason, don’t. We discover that our viewpoint character, the sensitive, charismatic figure at the center of all this hypocrisy and madness, sighing and rolling his eyes at the mendacity and ridiculous hopelessness of the world around him – we discover that he is no better than the rest – he is, in fact, awful. And yet, in the next scene when he shoots a bunch of people at the hospital, I feel we are right back there with him, only having held judgement against him for the moment, and are now feel free to laugh as he coolly murders doctors and nurses. Why was that judgement so short lived? Are we just sold on the lack of meaning, the absence of ramifications for his actions that so frustrates him? Is the movie doing in that moment exactly what it should? Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t want to give up all that I find to value in it just because it also contains parts I respond negatively to.

At the end of the day, this is a fascinating, funny, moving, troubling piece – I don’t think it is like anything else – it is like itself, and if nothing else, that is a thing truly worthy of praise. Furthermore, as written above, it is gorgeously shot, laugh-out-loud hilarious, shocking, and puzzling in a lot of good ways. The performances are uniformly excellent (Everett is so charismatic, Hadji-Lazaro embodies Gnaghi with lovable, quirky commitment – it’s really special, and Falchi, even if one could question the depth of her “characters” in the context of the story, is given a lot to do, and brings a lot of life and play to her four parts). The visuals are creatively striking and beautiful, and the score is a hoot. Finally, the film is thoughtful (even if those thoughts aren’t always the deepest, it is still thinking them) and takes big artistic swings without sacrificing the entertaining pleasures of being a weird, gross little horror movie. How could I not love something like that?

And so that’s that – I didn’t exactly have the experience I’d been looking forward to over the years, but it was interesting and rewarding to re-approach this film I’d treasured, find that it was other than I had remembered, or that perhaps I had changed, and ultimately, to come to terms with it differently. It was a reflective experience and time well spent. Plus, it is still, in many ways, really very cool and weird.