Dead of Night
Dylan Dog goes to Hollywood

The Italian national phenomenon Dylan Dog - Ruper Everett

After all the American movies which have been filmed on location in Rome, an all-Italian character is now off to Hollywood.

By Alessandro Mirra
february 2009

Dylan Dog, Italy’s biggest-selling comic book series featuring the supernatural private eye of the same name, is set to move to the big screen in a movie to be entitled Dead of Night. Shooting is scheduled to begin at the end of March in New Orleans. The film will be directed by
Kevin Munroe (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and will star Brandon Routh (Superman, Superman Returns). The choice of Routh for the lead role has not pleased hard-core Dog fans, who wanted to see British actor
Rupert Everett in the role. Not only did Everett star in the first screen version featuring the penniless investigator (the 1994 cult movie Cemetery Man) but he was also the inspiration for Dylan Dog creator Tiziano Sclavi after the writer had seen the gay icon in the 1984 hit Another Country.
In Italy, Dylan Dog is a national phenomenon, the comic books selling more than a million copies every month. But he is perhaps little known outside this country. So here’s the factfile.

Dylan Dog is a former Scotland Yard detective who left the British police to become a paranormal investigator. Fascinated by fear, he makes it his profession. Accompanied by his faithful sidekick Groucho (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Groucho Marx) Dylan looks into strange cases frequently involving werewolves, vampires, ghosts and other manifestations of the supernatural and occult, although often the true monsters in many of his investigations turn out to be human.

The series is mainly set in London, although Dylan occasionally travels elsewhere. The investigator lives at 7 Craven Road (Sclavi’s homage to cult horror director Wes Craven) in a cluttered apartment with a doorbell that screams. A vegetarian and a reformed alcoholic, Dylan is not a man of his time. He disdains mobile phones, plays the clarinet and drives an old VW Beetle convertible which he received in payment for his first case. He's also a hopeless romantic who loves and loses a new woman in nearly every issue.
His clothes are one of his defining characteristics: he always dresses the same way, in a red shirt, black jacket, and blue jeans. He bought twelve identical outfits after the death of his wife Lillie Connolly on the advice of Inspector Bloch, who was his superior when he worked at Scotland Yard and remains his father figure even after Dylan struck out on his own.
It was the death of Lillie which sparked Dylan’s new career.

An IRA militant, Lillie is arrested as a terrorist and subsequently dies in prison, shortly after marrying Dylan. It is after this tragic episode that the detective leaves the police force to become a paranormal PI. He rarely moves far from home, but his investigations constantly take him through the most obscure labryrinths of the human mind in tales that are like a more laid-back version of the X Files.
The stories are dark, disturbing and darkly comic. Perhaps not to everyone’s tastes. But his fans are legion and fiercely loyal. The doyen of Italian intellectuals (and author of the multi-million medieval best-seller The Name of the Rose) Umbert Eco has said there are three books he can re-read endlessly without getting bored: The Bible, The Odyssey and Dylan Dog.