Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Zakiyyah Madyun, Staff Writer

Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (1994) combines the grotesque, the sultry, and the existential with a modern beat that could only have come to fruition in the ‘90s. A frequent collaborator with Dario Argento, Soavi’s odd-ball gothic romance is a “B-movie” that deserves to be remembered. In many ways, it plays out like a meeting of the minds: Hartley, Scorscese, Fellini…Henson? The labyrinth of Cemetery Man is unafraid to borrow and reference, and, in doing so, it bends genre conventions to create something rather refreshing.

Our playfully droll anti-hero is Francesco Dellamorte, played to leading-man perfection by an underrated Rupert Everett. He dresses to the likeness of The Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft and speaks with a limp cigarette between his lips. Dellamorte is the keeper of the Buffalora Cemetery, a damp gothic graveyard where the dead mysteriously come back to life seven days after they’ve been buried. With the help of his assistant Gnagi, a pistol, and a blunt spade, Dellamorte sends the Returners back into the ground where they belong. 

Dellamorte exists in a perpetual hell: the repetitive and lonely nature of his existence only broken by occasional visits from various townspeople: a mayor, a detective, a kind older woman with a walker. Rife with gossip and corrupt politics, they foil the Returners as the dead-living. They outcast Dellamorte, repeatedly mischaracterizing him as an engineer and spreading rumors about his presumed impotence. His life is shaken up by the appearance of Anna Falchi’s nameless She, a character he falls in love with almost instantly. In tune with the repetitive nature of the film, She continually appears in various doomed iterations. As is horror tradition, sex and death are star crossed-lovers, and in Cemetery Man, this story plays out at face-value.

Like many of its counterparts, Cemetery Man is not without its misogyny. Falchi’s character is about as fleshed out as the Spirit Halloween-style Grim Reaper that approaches Dellamorte in the second act. She serves as more of a representation of haunting beauty and sexuality in the film than as an actual human woman. She delivers several particularly wince-worthy lines in her second iteration, when she returns from the dead as the Mayor’s secretary. The indiscriminate idolization and damnation of her character by Dellamorte help reveal the unsavoriness of his character. 

Dellamorte’s witty dialogue, snappy narration, and classically handsome looks help conceal, in the words of Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Voyter, “something dirtier and meaner.” In a comic line, he reveals that he has only read two books his entire life: one never finished, and one being the phone book. He treats Gnagi with a cruel dismissiveness and everyone else with a loner’s scorn. He constantly laments his existence, recounting dryly, “We all do what we can not to think about life.” When he eventually goes on a maniacal killing spree in the Buffalora town square, we come to see his character as he is. One can only wonder if Soavi intended to weave into Dellamorte the threads of a gothic Travis Bickle or if Martin Scorscese was reminded of his own work when he reportedly named Cemetery Man one of the best Italian horror films of the ‘90’s. 

With a gnarly and often uncomfortable eroticism that could have only been borne of the time, Cemetery Man flash pans between the sexy and revolting at a speed that will make you lose your lunch. In one of the funniest moments of the film, Dellamorte and a widower hook up on her recently deceased husband’s grave. “He would’ve liked to know,” is her answer to his brief hesitation. 

Despite its unsettling moments, Cemetery Man gets a lot right when it comes to comedy-horror. Practical effects abound, and the combination of kitschy puppetry and realistic gore hit the mark. Returner deaths range from creative to downright hilarious, and the absurdity only increases as the film drags on. A personal favorite moment is when a gang of motorcyclists, recently buried after a head on collision, ride out (to impressive heights) from beneath the soil on their bikes. 

Cemetery Man comes to a close with a bloodbath and an increasingly cold Dellamorte. “You and I are both the same,” he says to Death himself. “We kill out of indifference.” But we come to find that Dellamorte isn’t totally indifferent. In a last ditch attempt to leave town, Dellamorte and Gnagi speed down a tunnel labeled Not Buffalora, only to find nothing. 

“I should have known it.” he says with resignation.  “The rest of the world doesn’t exist.” In this unexpected finish, Cemetery Man emphasizes the horror in both apathy and passion.