Michele Soavi was the last great hope of the once noble Italian horror film. Production had faltered in the late 1980s, just as Soavi, a former actor and assistant director, directed his first feature film (after a music video and the documentary Il mondo dell’orrore di Dario Argento/Dario Argento’s World of Horror (1985)), Deliria/Stagefright (1987) produced by Joe D’Amato. He teamed up with his mentor Argento for La chiesa/The Church (1989) and La setta/The Sect (1991) before making this, his last horror film and indeed his last theatrically released film for twelve years.

Based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore by Tiziano Sclavi, itself a spin-of from the comic Dylan Dog, it’s an almost unclassifiable work that remains difficult to pin down – comedy, horror, surrealism and dark fantasy are stirred together into a satisfyingly weird film that can justifiably lay claim to being completely unique. Caretaker Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) and his child-like assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) live in a cemetery in the town of Buffalora where they spend their nights hunting down the restless dead who escape from their graves and preventing them from escaping into the nearby town. He falls head over heels for a young widow, referred to only as She (Anna Falchi) whose wealthy older husband is laid to rest in the cemetery but as they have sex on her husband’s grave (She doesn’t like the idea of keeping secrets from him) she’s bitten by her former spouse and Dellamorte is forced to shoot her when she inevitably rises from her own grave. As Dellamorte becomes increasingly obsessed with She, seeing her in the shape of other women who cross his path, Gnaghi becomes infatuated with the mayor’s teenage daughter, Valentina (Fabiana Formica) and keeps her reanimated head in a broken television set when she returns after being killed in a motorcycle accident. Dellamorte is eventually driven over the edge and goes on a killing spree but finds it impossible to persuade anyone, including the local police, that he’s responsible.

It’s not hard to see why Soavi hasn’t made another horror film, even after his patchy career resumed (he made a string of television films while tending to his ill son) with Arrivederci amore, ciao/The Goodbye Kiss in 2006. Where else could he take the genre after this? Part gory comedy, part necrophiliac romance, it’s a film that even now won’t sit comfortably in any particular genre and it remains the last great Italian horror film.

Much its appeal lies on Soavi’s customary visual panache, aided immeasurably by cinematographer Mauro Marchetti and art director Massimo Antonello Geleng, who provided the huge, extraordinary cemetery set where much of the film takes place. The poetic images and small flourishes (a photograph of She’s husband embedded in his gravestone reacts with anger and dismay as She and Dellamorte make love on his grave) are unforgettable, from the angel wings from a statue framing Anna Falchi as she sits astride Everett on the gravestone to the haunting final shot, a head-scratcher that brings us back to a seemingly throwaway image from near the start of the film. All of this is underscored by a fine score from Riccardo Biseo and Manuel De Sica that effectively mixes traditional orchestral cues with the sort of electronic/prog rock passages that characterised the work on Dario Argento before he became obsessed with heavy metal.

Performances are all first rate. Falchi is fine as the love interest, though isn’t given a great deal to do other than be enigmatic and take her clothes of. Francois Hadji-Lazaro, the French musician who turned up in Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s La cité des enfants perdus/The City of Lost Children the following year, is great as the alternative disgusting and loveable Gnaghi, whose sole mode of communication is through short, guttural utterings that only Dellamorte can understand until that off the wall climax where their roles seem to have been reversed. But it’s Rupert Everett’s film, an unusual role for an actor who showed no affinity for horror before or since. Although he wasn’t Soavi’s immediate choice for the role it now seems ridiculous that he wasn’t cast straightaway given that Sclavi based the comic character’s appearance on the actor.

Everett gets the bulk of the film’s melancholy, philosophical and witty musings (“the living dead and the dying living are all the same”) which is difficult to know how to react to. Some of Dellamorte’s flowery narration sounds like it should be profound (“disposing of dead people is a public service, whereas you’re in all sorts of trouble if you kill someone while they’re still alive”) but screenwriter Gianni Romoli has his tongue firmly in his cheek throughout. And it’s not just the dialogue that raises a laugh or two – Soavi gets to cheekily restage a classic moment from cult British horror film Psychomania (1973), one featuring a biker whose body hadn’t been entirely disentangled from the wreckage of his motorcycle before he was interred.

There’s a problematic moment when Dellamorte encounters another incarnation of She, an assistant to the mayor who claims to be terrified of penetrative sex leading Dellamorte to take the unusual and extreme step of begging a doctor to castrate him so that he’s not a threat to her (he refuses). He’s later rebuffed by the woman when she tells him that the mayor has raped her and “cured” her of her fears and she’s now going to marry her attacker. It’s an entirely unwarranted moment that sits at odds with the dark fairy tale ambience of the rest of the film, an unnecessary development that leaves an unfortunate sour taste.

Like most of Soavi’s work, Dellamorte Dellamore (released in the States as the hopelessly on-the-nose Cemetery Man) tends to run out of steam in the home straight and becomes a tad repetitive. But while it lasts, it’s a remarkable film that saw the Italian horror film out in style – Martin Scorsese no less called it the greatest Italian film of the 1990s though to be fair there wasn’t that much competition. The strange, unresolved ending annoyed some but in the context of the film’s other-worldly feel it makes a perfect sort of sense.

The comics were adapted again in 2011 in the States as Dylan Dog: Dead of Night by director Kevin Munroe. It almost goes without saying that it has none of the wit, style or inexplicable surrealism of Soavi’s film, was panned by the critics and has already slipped into the obscurity where it belongs. In 2011 Fangoria reported that Soavi was planning a sequel though sadly there’s never been any sign of it actually happening.