The dead in this town do not stay buried, and the cemetery caretaker has grown so used to shooting them in the head a second time that the job has become almost boring. He falls in love anyway, repeatedly, with the same face on different women.

CEMETERY MAN (1994) stars Rupert Everett as Francesco Dellamorte, keeper of the Buffalora cemetery, where the dead rise seven days after death for reasons nobody bothers to explain. His only companion is Gnaghi, played by Francois Hadji-Lazaro, a nearly wordless assistant who falls for the reanimated head of the mayor’s daughter. Anna Falchi plays the woman Dellamorte keeps losing, in one incarnation after another.

Michele Soavi directed, working from Gianni Romoli’s script adapted from the novel by Tiziano Sclavi, creator of the Italian comic Dylan Dog, whose hero was drawn to look like Everett. Soavi had come up under Dario Argento and Terry Gilliam, and the film mixes zombie gore with deadpan romance and outright slapstick, never settling into one register.

It was an Italian, French, and German co-production, shot through with a bleak, bureaucratic sense of humor about death as paperwork and love as the only antidote to repetition. It found its real audience later, as a cult object whose reputation grew well past its original release.