Like his mentor Argento, Soavi demonstrates an attraction to individuals and groups in isolated settings in his movies, and this can be observed through the analogy of the snow globe of nightmares – a pocket universe, created only to house the characters of the movie (pmcinern, 2015). Of course, every movie ever made is such; an existence formed only to house the director’s musings. Where certain movies differ is in an ironic awareness – where the creator is unafraid to show

the prismed edges of the universe, first to us, the audience, then to his or her own creations – the characters that dwell within the movie. Think of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), but with one difference – for Truman, there was an escape, into “the real world”. For Soavi’s characters, there is no escape from their confines, no infinite expanse beyond the edge of their observable universe (Soavi pushes this analogy further with his use of an actual snow globe at the start of the movie – it is one of the first things we see, its contents a chilling portent of the movie’s climax). It could therefore be argued that Francesco Dellamorte exists only within the confines of his own experiences – that his world is self-constructed and self-observed, and there is no escape from the Cemetery for Francesco because there is no escape from himself. This is observed in the final sequence, the abyss, and Francesco’s sudden descent into mute madness when faced with the all-too-finite edge of his universe.

Of course, one could argue that to seek an absolute explanation of the mysteries of Dellamorte Dellamore is perhaps to miss the point. Understanding of the movie may come not from unlocking its puzzle box but from unravelling and examining the feelings it awakens in the viewer (which leads my subconscious to make another link to the work of David Lynch; most notably the films Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire – a trio of experiences for which true comprehension is only achieved through the conduit of emotion, rather than the cold, logical search for a narrative solution).