Joe Lynch takes a crack at Lovecraft with enjoyably icky results

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn’t exist.

There have been numerous film adaptations of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, featuring everyone from Sandra Dee (The Dunwich Horror) to Nicolas Cage (Color Out of Space). However, it was the late filmmaker Stuart Gordon who best managed to capture the peculiar and often perverse charms of Lovecraft’s work. With their combination of weirdo humor, bizarre imagery, kinky sex, grisly bloodshed and better-than-expected performances, his Re-Animator and From Beyond became instant cult classics and unquestioned high points of the entire horror genre in the 1980s.

With his new film Suitable Flesh, director Joe Lynch (whose credits include Wrong Turn 2 and Mayhem) is clearly trying to invoke the spirit of Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptations with his take on the short story “The Thing on the Doorstep.” It has a look and feel that immediately evokes those earlier films, even utilizing key Gordon collaborators like screenwriter Dennis Paola and co-producer/co-star Barbara Crampton in a key supporting role. However, the result is no mere pastiche of past glories: it’s a smart and impeccably crafted genre film that manages to be cheerfully gross, surprisingly sexy and very funny, sometimes all at once.

Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) is a psychiatrist with a successful practice and a good home life with her husband, Edward (Johnathon Schaech). That happy life is turned upside-down with the arrival of Asa Waite (Judah Lewis), a troubled young man who seeks her help. He claims that some mysterious entity has possessed the body of his father, Ephraim (Bruce Davison), and that he’s now in danger of being claimed as well. Elizabeth thinks that he’s suffering from some kind of extreme personality disorder, possibly connected to abuse he may have suffered as a child, and that his claims are merely his mind trying to find a way to cope with the horrors he’s faced.

And yet, there’s something about Asa and his plight, especially after he seems to revert to a completely different personality before her eyes. It arouses Elizabeth’s sense of compassion and she decides to pay Asa a house call one day, where something else gets aroused between them, if you know what I mean. As it turns out, Asa really has been possessed by some kind of body-swapping demon and it’s now decided that Elizabeth’s body might be a more agreeable host, thereby putting everyone she knows in danger.

Fans of Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptations will no doubt enjoy all the various callbacks and Easter eggs strewn throughout the film. However, as it goes on, the film becomes less beholden to Gordon’s legacy and blazes its own creepy and crazy trail. Although some of the storytelling is a bit muddled at times, Lynch keeps things moving along at a crisp pace and certainly knows how to set up and execute the violent set-pieces. More impressively, he also brings a welcome jolt of eroticism to the proceedings, ranging from the numerous sexual encounters that feel like welcome flashbacks to an age when filmmakers weren’t afraid to show such things to the gender-bending twist that occurs when the demon (whom we are presumably meant to read as male) discovers the unexpected joys of receiving sexual pleasure while inhabiting a female body.

The best thing about the film is the central performance from Graham, an actress who has never quite gotten her due despite having delivered strong turns in films as varied as Drugstore Cowboy, Two Girls and a Guy, Boogie Nights and Bowfinger. Here, her character goes through a roller-coaster of emotions throughout from arousal to terror to confusion, and also spends a good chunk of the narrative with someone else inside her (you know what I mean) in a real high-wire act of a performance. One false move on her part and the entire project runs the risk of collapsing into nothing more than heavy-breathing, blood-spewing nonsense. She accomplishes that beautifully here and even though this has been a year filled with outstanding female performances, this is one of the best.

Suitable Flesh is the kind of out-of-left-field surprise that genre fans always hope to stumble upon when plowing through the seemingly endless array of horror titles that come out each year. It has moments of great humor as well as legitimate eerie moments, and is quite clever in how it updates the material to reflect contemporary concerns. If it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Re-Animator or From Beyond, it certainly honors them, while working perfectly well as its own individual icky thing.

Suitable Flesh opens in limited release in theaters & premieres on VOD October 27th.

Suitable Flesh Trailer: