The horror filmmaker talks with us about balancing humor & horror, maintaining the spirit of Stuart Gordon & more.
When Stuart Gordon, director of 80s horror classics Reanimator and From Beyond, passed away in 2020, it seemed unlikely that anyone could take over his signature skill for blending horror, humor, and eroticism into one great, gooey, over the top production. However, watching Suitable Flesh, available on Shudder starting January 26th, it’s apparent that its director Joe Lynch, who previously helmed the 2017 cult hit Mayhem, has the chops for it. We talked with him for a few minutes about Gordon’s legacy, the underrated Heather Graham, and what the return of adult themes in movies means.
THE SPOOL: What drew you to want to work on Suitable Flesh?
JOE LYNCH: Well, I have an undying love for so many elements of this movie, but mostly a sheer adoration for Stuart Gordon’s work. I grew up with Stuart Gordon’s movies and in so many different ways between Reanimator and From Beyond kind of introducing me to eroticism in horror and Lovecraft, but also the way that he was so able to deftly jump genres.
You know, this is the guy that did Dolls and From Beyond and Reanimator, but then also wrote Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and also did King of the Ants and The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, and Space Truckers. So many different movies I look back at in both my own work, but also the movies that I loved. And I can see that the seeds in the DNA of Stuart Gordon are in myself. That came off wrong, but you get what I’m talking about.
TS: Actually, you read my mind about my next question. [Screenwriter] Dennis Paoli worked many times with Stuart Gordon. What inspiration have you drawn from Gordon’s movies, and which is your personal favorite?
JL: Well, in terms of my influences with Stuart Gordon, I would definitely say that the way that he was able to blend so many different genres, but also be a bit of a provocateur. Some of my favorite filmmakers, especially from the 80s between Paul Verhoeven and David Cronenberg and Brian De Palma, are directors who knew how to push buttons and to push the envelope, if you will, and Stuart Gordon was very much one of those directors.
And I can see like definite ties in my own work and how it’s sometimes cool to push a few buttons, you know, without exploiting too much. And then in terms of my favorite Stuart Gordon movie, easily Reanimator. That said, I just I feel like I know his work front to back. I think one of his most underrated movies is King of the Ants, which is a movie that he did with Asylum back in like the early aughts that not a lot of people know about. Supposedly, there is a special edition Blu-ray that’s coming out hopefully soon, because that’s a movie that is wildly underappreciated. And it’s so far removed from what people expect Stuart’s work to be.
But he was always such a great, again, blender of genres, and also such a wonderful actor’s director. There’s some of his finest directing of actors in that film. If you are familiar with that film, then there is a very particular Easter egg in Suitable Flesh. An actual character from King of the Ants shows up on Heather Graham’s couch. Maybe not the couch situation you’re thinking of, but when you see the movie, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
TS: What do you find are the biggest challenges in trying to balance horror and humor?
JL: That’s a really good question. One of the most challenging parts of blending humor and horror is just trying to find ways to create stakes without losing those stakes through character and plot. You know, one thing that makes comedy so much fun sometimes is that you can do slapstick. You can have people falling down in, you know, a garbage compactor or drain and hilarity ensues. But then you go like, God, that person might have really hurt themselves. And if the tone of the movie is allowing you to kind of eradicate stakes, then it’s all in good fun. But if you change that up and you make that into something in a horror movie, it can be incredibly disturbing. It can be incredibly violent.
It’s about knowing tone. And a lot of times tone is established, at least for me, is established through the story and through the characters and the situations. Now, like Stuart Gordon, his movies came along at a time that I was very susceptible to any kind of genre at the point, and in time, like in the early to mid-80s, where the splatter movement kind of came to fruition.
So movies like Evil Dead 2 and Return of the Living Dead, Reanimator, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, these are all movies that I saw. And I questioned because I thought they were horror movies, but they’re incredibly funny. I was not confused, but I was very interested in that balance of tone.
And, you know, films later on, like Shaun of the Dead, that’s a perfect example of knowing where comedy and horror need to play and knowing when to push harder on the horror or push harder on the comedy, because you never want to establish something with these really funny people. And then it makes no difference whether they die or not. For me, it’s like if you can present a film in a way that looks like a horror film and feels like it has palpable stakes, and it just so happens that the people in the movie are really funny.
That to me is the most ideal version of horror comedy. For example, there’s a movie that I just watched again that came out like two years ago called Werewolves Within, a Josh Rubin movie. And that’s a perfect modern version of the archetypal horror comedy, because if you turn the sound off, that movie looks incredibly terrifying. It is very slick and has all the atmosphere and style for days. Then you turn the music back up or you turn the volume on, and everything that’s coming out of these people’s mouths is just really funny. And it never loses stakes.
So to me, that was always something that I was very aware of, whether it was from Stuart Gordon stuff, or even films that I’ve done like Mayhem, where I wanted to make sure that we were never taken away from the severity of the situation. It wasn’t the film that was saying “be funny.” It was the people that just naturally had a sense of humor that never took away from the fact that there are people dying, or there are people getting hurt, or people getting eaten, or their bodies are taken over by mysterious, demonic, sexual creatures.
As long as you have an idea of where that line is, that tonal line is, I feel like you can take the audience on this ride, never lose the stakes, but also break the rules sometimes too, even if it’s just for a laugh.
TS: What convinced you that Heather Graham was the right actor to play Elizabeth?
JL: Everyone talks about how funny Heather is. Obviously her amazing work in Boogie Nights, but everyone remembers the first half of Boogie Nights more than the second half. There was a scene in it, it’s shot on VHS, and it’s in the limo where Jack Horner is presenting Roller Girl in this like cinema verite 80s VHS version of one of his pornos. There is a look that she gives to the camera that has still haunted me to this day. We watch this character rolling through scenes and having a great time and doing coke and fucking people and just, you know, everything was grand.
And then the consequence of that is all in that one shot. And I’ll never forget that shot and how that affected me so much. But also, you know, people remember her from her comedic stuff like Austin Powers, and Bowfinger, and Scrubs, but people forget about movies like Drugstore Cowboy and how devastating her performance is in that, or her turn in Twin Peaks. So it was knowing very much like your question about horror comedy or knowing that tone. I felt like from the get go, Heather knew that line between having a sense of humor in scenes and even embracing some of the most ludicrous situations like some of the ones that we have in here. But she was never forgetting the dramatic element of it, and the stakes that are behind it, and the consequences that come with that.
If she ever played that light, the movie would never work. And I knew that going in just as a fan, then talking to her about it and how much she was so interested in the horror genre that she never really kind of dabbled. Like she dabbled in it a little bit with From Hell and stuff, but she had never really gone full bore horror like she has in this before. I think she really enjoyed that challenge. Also it’s just, look, I knew that there was a sexual component involved in this. So I needed someone that was going to be very comfortable with the sexual side of it and the erotic nature of it.
Heather has done a few of those films before. We laughed about that a little bit, but it was knowing that there was someone who was, you know, comfortable inside her skin, but also outside of her skin. That was the thing that made me go “okay,” and then after talking with her for ten minutes, we both looked at each other on a Zoom call and went “Are we going to make this movie together? I think we’re going to do this movie together.”
She was she was up for the challenge, and so was I. And it was a fantastic working relationship with her.
TS: There seems to be in recently an uptick in movies made very much for adults, like Suitable Flesh, Infinity Pool, Poor Things, after a long period of very heavily comic book related movies. Why do you think that uptick is happening?
JL: Well, in terms of the reemergence of erotic cinema, I think that has been a little bit dormant in the past couple of years. Partially, I think it’s due to both a cultural thing, but also a technological advance, if you will. All the movies that really influence Suitable Flesh from like the 80s and 90s, those were films that I had seen and many people had seen in the theater or at home, you know, to spice up the situation a little bit, whether it’s a first date or a last date or a night at the movies or a date night at home. These were the sort of things that were a slightly more respectable version of erotica, whether it’s pornography or what have you to kind of, you know, turn up the heat a bit.
And since the advent of the Internet, the idea of having erotica distribution through cinema had kind of gone by the wayside, because someone can just type in a couple of keywords and boop, there it is, you don’t need any context, you don’t need any character. There was this whole advent of the gonzo era of porn, where gone were the moments of the sultry, sexy mailman or the pool boys showing up and everything. And then you have to do away with all that context and all that exposition, that’s all gone, just give me the goods.
That was it, and that kind of changed people’s ways of being able to ingest this erotica that that changed things. But also, I think in the last eight to ten years, especially with the advent of the Me Too movement, and the rise of intimacy coordinators on the production side, I think that kind of swayed things a little bit. I think people started to get a little afraid of bringing sexuality into the fold from a production standpoint.
We need to as filmmakers be responsible and be respectful to the people that are going to be exposing themselves chemistry-wise and passion-wise and sexual-wise, in these scenes for the world to see. I think it became harder and harder for filmmakers to have a reason to go through the process of showing that and shooting that and presenting that. It’s not easy. It’s not comfortable either.
I think it was it was harder and harder and more awkward for filmmakers to present this as long as it was part of the story making process, or if it propelled the plot, and wasn’t just “Hey, where’s the sex scene?” There had to be a legitimate reason. And if you look at movies like just this year alone, Infinity Pool and Poor Things and Saltburn, there were reasons why the sexuality was pushing the plot along, or exposing new layers to all of these characters.
It was important to me that Suitable Flesh also did that, and was right from the get go in the script. It was one of the reasons why it was so hard for Stuart and Dennis to get the movie made like ten to fifteen years ago, because the culture was different. Then it felt like now is the perfect time to not only present sex in a way that like in the horror genre was a little bit dormant over the past couple years, but also do it with characters that maybe you haven’t seen in this light in a very long time, especially older women in professional situations like this. That, to me, was so much more exciting to present this in a unique way, especially in Lovecraft. Whereas if this was the original script, as written by Dennis that was adapted from Lovecraft decades ago, it would have starred two men.
We had seen that movie before, and we had also seen, you know, erotica from the male gaze, numerous times for decades, it was always the male gaze. So why not present it in a way that was progressive in a female gaze, forward sort of way. That was one of the theses that I presented to the producers from the jump. They were willing to go along with that challenge. And lo and behold, it feels like we’re back at a moment in time where sexuality, as long as it is presented respectfully, and consensually, can still be hot, can still be part of the plot, and can still get people titillated.
Suitable Flesh premieres on Shudder January 26th.