Subjective Reality in ‘Cemetery Man’
2024 marks the 30th anniversary of Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore) Michele Soavi’s surreal Italian masterpiece, and one of the very best horror films of its decade. It is an amazing, weird movie, that like all the best weird movies, presents its weirdness as normalcy. For the characters, this is their life, these events are mundane, and those ideas are major driving factors in this film. It’s a film worth celebrating for its pure imagination as much as its wild tone. It’s a cartoon of existential dread, a tale of a lonely isolated weirdo who finally snaps — something that plenty of people really aren’t that interested anymore. At worst, a story like that can come off as condoning the behavior, but much more often than that, films centering on that topic usually come across as simply being edgy for edgy’s sake and that’s so far from what Cemetery Man is doing that I don’t most people would ever even automatically think of it as that kind of movie because it’s in a genre all to itself.
It’s both tough and surprisingly easy to say what Cemetery Man is about. Again, it is often very direct in its weirdness. The plot centers on a man named Francesco Dellamore, the caretaker at a small cemetery where the dead rise from their grave every single night and he has to be the one to put them down again, to maintain order in the workplace. He has an assistant named Gnaghi, with whom he cannot verbally communicate. All of this is happening by the time the movie starts, and clearly has been for some time. This is the normal, every day life of Dellamore as we are introduced to him. This is his reality.
That, I think, is the genius of Cemetery Man in a nutshell. It is a movie that we experience entirely through the eyes of its protagonist, a man already on the edge and casually tumbling off, and we are as tied to him as Gnaghi is. Whatever he does, we’re bound to him and completely along for the ride.
The film is based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore by Tiziano Sclavi and bears enough in common with Sclavi’s Dylan Dog comic books that it’s often considered an unofficial adaptation, especially since the film stars Rupert Everett, who was the visual inspiration for the comic book character. The plot of the movie truly kicks into gear when Dellamore first lays his eyes on an unnamed widow, the first of many characters played by Anna Falchi over the course of the story. Falchi, probably the most stunning any human being has ever looked in a movie, first appears in the cemetery to visit her late husband’s grave. Through her character, we are truly introduced to this lens of subjective reality, aside from the obviously weird and supernatural backdrop against which the film is already set. But even that is reflective of the protagonist’s own worldview.
Dellamore falls in love with the widow at first sight, and she — if anything — falls in love with the cemetery, the ossuary in particular. They want to make love, but she doesn’t want to hide anything from her (dead) husband, so they do it in the middle of the cemetery. Naturally, the dead rise and her husband is none too thrilled about these proceedings. She is killed in the struggle and this moment provides the momentum for the movie as a whole. As soon as she dies, Dellamore might as well have already walked over the edge of a cliff. This was a very bored and lonely man who had only his job, only one friend who he couldn’t carry a conversation with, and those things are his entire life. He meets a woman who brings a sense of excitement back into his life, a thrill, maybe even a hope for the future and she’s gone almost immediately. From the moment she dies, he’s spiraling and we’re simply forced to watch the entire world decay through his eyes.
He starts projecting her image onto every new woman he meets, his mute friend falls in love with a severed head, and Dellamore even carries on occasional conversations with the Grim Reaper as his mental state declines and yet everything still feels somehow natural, everything still works because of this absurd world that’s been established for us. This was a weird, offbeat world right from the first scene, it’s an easy ask of the audience to simply watch it get weirder.
It is so fascinating to take in everything that happens to Dellamore along his slow descent, which is objectively just him spiraling into self-destruction but genuinely feels like an odyssey, and attempt to piece together what it actually means. After all, Dellamore is a lonely man and this is very much a film about loneliness. When the widow dies and he begins to see each new woman he takes an interest in as her, that could mean any number of things. It is, on one hand, his grief, which is a grief for a woman he barely knew, which should only make it easier to see her face reflected in the faces of others.
He was also the cause of her death, ultimately, simply for allowing their tryst in the cemetery to take place. His role in her death only becomes more explicit when she rises for a second time, implying that the first time he shot her when she awakened in the cemetery and he believed she was rising from the dead, she was still alive. He’s burdened by that. Seeing her in these other women could subconsciously be his reminder to himself that getting too close to him ends one way, and she is his constant reminder of that. That would certainly be fitting when taking the last woman he meets in the film into account.
In addition to that, there could also be an element of the way men all too often view women they’re interested in. Projecting past relationships onto potential new ones is nothing new for many, many men, and this movie simply takes that concept as literally as possible. Too many men see “the one that got away” in every new woman that catches their eye, and are effectively chasing the same relationship over and over. And for many of the loneliest people whose “one that got away” might also have been their only, the entire thing is a fiction. They’re projecting relationships they’ve never really had onto future relationships they probably never will. I think Cemetery Man is very much about that, in many ways.
The film does make it clear that these relationships are not all based around sex, though. In fact, it makes it explicit. The second woman Dellamore meets tells him that she is incredibly averse to sex, and she cannot be with a man who would want that. Naturally, Dellamore’s solution is to go to the doctor demanding to have his penis removed. The doctor refuses to do that and instead gives him an injection to make him temporarily impotent. When he next sees her, she of course tells him the news. Due to circumstances I won’t even begin to get into in this article, she loves sex now, and can no longer be with him because he’s impotent. Dellamore’s worldview begins to truly spiral and he essentially embarks on a killing spree, with his grip on reality having completely faded away. None of this is real.
He doesn’t even have the certainty of his job anymore. Grueling as it is to kill the dead and re-bury them every night without the thanks or knowledge of the local authorities that he’s even doing it, Death himself comes to scold Dellamore for the job he’s been doing. The dead are his domain after all. In these scenes, as we are subjected to the cemetery man’s crumbling worldview, Death is the devil on his shoulder. The Reaper eggs Dellamore on toward his eventual murder spree, telling him to stop killing the dead, and suggests that if he needs to kill someone, why doesn’t he kill the living?
The third woman Dellamore meets seems like she could be the one, but in the end only puts a fine point on his self-isolated loneliness. She says all the right things, she takes an interest in him, she has sex with him and survives the experience, his temporary impotency is gone, all of these things that had hindered previous encounters are no more. And then he loses the last shred of our empathy toward him, as well as his conscience as he finds out she’s a sex worker and kills her for it. There’s nothing left in him. It’s a chillingly hollow thing to witness, to watch him reflect on it, and it’s a chillingly hollow person he’s become. He starts off killing people that he clearly sees as having wronged him, from this woman and her associate to the guys who regularly vandalize his cemetery, but after a certain point he’s killing doctors and nurses he just happens to see as he makes his way through the hospital. He’s killing indiscriminately because that is where his descent has been spiraling toward throughout the entire film. Nothing matters. Nothing is real.
The ending of Cemetery Man puts the biggest, bluntest point on its subjective POV, when Dellamore and Gnaghi make their plan to finally leave town even though they would be wanted for several murders, many of which Dellamore committed in public and in broad daylight. But, to spoil the end of the film because it’s probably the most important part when discussing its subjectivity, their escape is cut short. And it’s not because the cops catch up with them. It’s because there’s nowhere to go. When they reach the edge of town, they reach the literal end of the earth. There’s nothing beyond the town Dellamore has known his whole life, it is literally the only place that exists, and he’s not even surprised. Nothing could be more subjective than that.
Even the role Gnaghi plays in the story and his relationship with Dellamore is illuminated in this scene. As they look into the abyss, Gnaghi speaks clearly for the first time and asks to be taken home. Dellamore responds with, “Gna,” the only thing Gnaghi has said throughout the entire film. They have, in this moment, completely switched roles. Was this because Dellamore was simply not communicating with or listening to his friend, in reality, or is it that Gnaghi had already reached a point of pure contentedness with the world and the way it actually was, and thus hand nothing to say? Would that mean that Dellamore himself had, in assuming that role, finally reached that point?
It’s impossible to say, and I’m not looking for answers, because that’s boring. That’s not what a movie like Cemetery Man is for. It’s an impressionist painting. A vaguely concrete image is there, but you can keep looking at and see something different every time. It’s a movie that runs a whole spectrum of tones and subjects from cartoonishly comedic to deeply disturbing and yet maintains such a strong consistency throughout because it is just so weird, and all of its eccentricities, its downright bizarre moments — really, the entire story — presented so matter-of-factly.
It is a movie about an isolated freak embarking on a murder spree that is somehow charming, funny, even soothing at times and all these things that a film of that type is typically not supposed to be, and it is all the better for it. Reality in Cemetery Man is whatever its protagonist decides it to be, and we’re just bearing witness to it. Cemetery Man is, in short, a film that has to be seen to be believed, and probably not even then.
