Rustblade Records releases the soundtrack for the classic Italian horror film
Director Michele Soavi’s startling blackly comic horror masterpiece DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE (released in English territories under the goofy name CEMETERY MAN) is one of the final great films coming out Italy, released long after the gory glory days of the European horror boom and a movie that was at odd with the smugness of its decade. Based on the novel by DYLAN DOG creator Tiziano Sclavi, the film stars British actor Rupert Everett as Dellamorte, a hapless graveyard caretaker in a small Italian village who – along with his simple-minded assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) – discovers that the dead buried in his cemetery refuse to stay deceased, rising again to feast on their families. When the lonely young man falls in love with the comely widow (the stunning Anna Falchi) of a dead millionaire, he is crestfallen to have his romance aborted by his beloved’s own zombification, leading to the final unspooling of his senses and a sequence of events that are alternately absurd, erotic, hilarious and horrifying.
There’s no other movie quite like DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, patchwork of bizarre eccentricity that it is, and indeed, Manuel De Sica’s all-over-the-map score is the perfect aural backdrop for Soavi’s shenanigans. Now, Italy’s Rustblade Records have released De Sica’s wild collection of cues in a beautiful deluxe vinyl packaged, with a pretty purple record housed in an attractive sleeve and with a sexy gate-fold poster tucked inside. It’s a great framework for one of the weirdest and coolest horror movie soundtracks of all time.
De Sica’s score jumps around from minimalist synth noodlings, to Gothic, Grand Guignol orchestral suites, to timpani driven doom mini-operas and yet all of it manages to make sense, with a re-concurring main theme winding its way into the fabric of almost every cue. There’s a sense of melancholy, of playful macabre and occasionally De Sica channels Philip Glass, with endless ascending and descending notes dramatically charting Dellamorte’s delirious mission to send those pesky “returners” back to their tombs once and for all. And look out for key moments where the composer seems to nod to Tangerine Dream and even fellow Italo-horror music man Fabio Frizzi.
DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE is a manic, magnificent and breathless motion picture that just gets better with age. And it’s a joy to have the mad music that moves the picture along isolated here in this wonderful limited edition (only 499 copies made!) presentation.