Suitable Flesh exists in a perfect place between ridiculous and rewarding. It knows exactly what it is, a balls-to-the-wall, bonkers hybrid of Lovecraftian horror and erotic thrillers that’s essentially an homage and epilogue to the great director Stuart Gordon’s career. If Suitable Flesh is cheese, then it is artisanal, creamy cheese of the finest charcuteries — and yes, it’s meaty, too. The film had a blast on the festival circuit, and has now come to theaters and everywhere you rent your movies.
Heather Graham stars as Dr. Elizabeth Derby, a smart, sexy therapist, and Barbara Crampton is Dr. Daniella Upton, her smart, sexy mentor. Elizabeth has a nice suburban life, but her husband (Johnathon Schaech) is a bit emasculated, having lost his job, and the passion seems to have evacuated their home. One day, she encounters a new patient who has a seemingly severe diagnosis of schizophrenia, and whose entire disposition changes on a dime. He says that he’s in danger, and he’s right. There’s a bodiless entity that is able to possess different vessels based on a strict set of rules, and the young man (played by a relentless Judah Lewis) is losing the battle for his body and soul.
Dr. Derby experiences a kind of Lacanian lust toward the patient, though, and is unable to get him out of her head. When she attempts to help him, she gets caught up in a nightmarish world of sex and sadism that uncovers secrets in her marriage and in Dr. Upton’s personal life. Loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” Suitable Flesh is a mind- and loin-melting good time from director Joe Lynch (Mayhem, Wrong Turn 2) that both asks and screams, ‘Who do you think you are!?” (a question emblazoned on its very poster). Like most Lovecraft, it’s interested in the horrors of the body, of infinity, of identity.
Graham, Crampton, Lewis, Schaech, and Lynch all spoke to MovieWeb way back during the film’s Tribeca premiere. You can watch our video discussion above.
Barbara Crampton Does Stuart Gordon Justice
The great Barbara Crampton has a very personal relationship to Suitable Flesh. The actor and producer essentially got the film made, seeing it as a part of not just her legacy, but a continuation of the legacy cemented by Lovecraft auteur Stuart Gordon, who directed her in several of her first films (From Beyond, Re-Animator). We asked her why it was important to bring this film to life, and how she thinks it’s related to Gordon’s timeless cinema.
“That’s a big question,” began Crampton. “I feel like Stuart Gordon gave me my career, and I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for him. Maybe I’d be doing something else. But his movies are so iconic, and they’re just beloved by so many in the horror genre. And I didn’t even realize that I was doing horror until I came back with You’re Next like 12 years ago, and I went, ‘Oh, I guess I do a lot of horror films.’ So you know, this is kind of the space that I live in.” She continued:
“But with this film, I realized my roots go back to Lovecraft. And when Stuart passed, he had been trying to make this movie and wasn’t able to for a number of reasons, for a number of years. And when I read it, after sort of reconvening with Dennis Paoli over the death of Stuart, I asked, ‘What do you have lying on your shelf that you guys didn’t do?’ He sent me this, and I didn’t know it was going to be a Lovecraft film. And then I read it, and it was Lovecraft and I thought to myself at the time, ‘This is my legacy.’ Lovecraft is really my legacy. I don’t know if it’s horror, because I’ve done a lot of other things, but it really is Lovecraft.”
“I loved the script,” she went on, “and I wanted to do him justice, and I wanted to do the story justice, and I was able to work with Dennis Paoli again, who I love and, and work in the universe of Lovecraft. And also, bringing Joe in — I had come to know his work over the past few years, I thought that he was really the best match for the material, and it means everything to me. It’s just continuing the Lovecraft universe and continuing where I came from, from the beginning.”
It’s honestly surprising that H.P. Lovecraft hasn’t been ‘canceled’ yet, considering his very racist, xenophobic, and misogynist writings, and yet, the cosmic horror he produced fittingly transcends any one person. “Man, you don’t want to get film Twitter started sometimes, when it comes to, ‘Who are we going to cancel next? Oh, they’re dead? That doesn’t matter. Let’s go back in time, who cares?'” laughed director Joe Lynch. “Lovecraft has been somewhat problematic in terms of just his thematics, how he treated certain characters, certain people, his viewpoints. Which to be fair, before he died, he did backtrack and say ‘Maybe I was a little wrong there.” He elaborated:
“But sometimes you do have to separate art from artists. And you know, what he contributed to the horror genre, to the science fiction genre, to literature in general, is something that cannot be denied. And, you know, whether people find some of his politics problematic or not, you can’t deny that you can look at and read some of his prose and some of his ideas and see how forward-thinking he was.”
“And that was something that, because of the original Re-Animator that Stuart directed and because there wasn’t ‘HP Lovecraft’ above the title of this one but there was one back then, it immediately made me go, ‘Who was this Lovecraft? Maybe I should stop reading Stephen King for a minute and check this guy out?’ And immediately it blew my mind,” continued Lynch, “because there were just ideas that expanded my thinking about other worlds, cosmic horror, fear of the body, fear of the unknown, fear of one’s self and identity, and those sorts of things really just opened my mind up without psychotropic drugs or anything. They made you go, ‘There is a bigger world out there than just slasher flicks,’ at that time in the ’80s, and that really just got me excited to seek out what other filmmakers were doing with Lovecraft.”
Suitable Flesh Saved Joe Lynch
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And so the boy became a man, and his passion for Lovecraft has evolved into a skill that’s on full display in Suitable Flesh, which manages to be both a tribute to Lovecraft and Stuart Gordon, and its own kind of bananas. “I never in a million years would have thought that I would have the opportunity to take that Lovecraftian baton and have the torch passed on to me, until I got that email that day from Barbara,” began Lynch. “And this was at a time when everybody was going, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ It was literally weeks after the pandemic. And I was at a crossroads in my own life, I was going through a really hard time. And sometimes you need those things that we all go through, real trials and tribulations, whether it’s on a global scale, or right on your doorstep, so to speak.” He went on:
“Barbara Crampton’s email saved my life, bar none. Having this project come to me at this very particular moment in my life meant the world. Even if you want to put it on a surface level and say that this was like just a good distraction — “Here, Joe, work on the script, come up with some ideas, we’ll figure it out and we’ll go from there. Maybe it’ll get made, maybe it won’t, who knows?” But it was the right sort of project, it was the right sort of creative, artistic endeavor that I needed in my life at that very moment. And I’ll never stop thanking her for that.”
“You know, everyone says that, right, around this time when you’re in PR mode — ‘Well, it’s my most personal film,’ or, ‘This was a real passion project.’ But I can honestly say that this may be one of the most personal things that I’ve ever done,” continued Lynch. “And it wouldn’t be without having Judah and Johnathon and Barbara and Heather and Dennis and Brian, and all these people supporting me and supporting this idea. Plus, we got to make a really cool psychotropic, transgressive, hard psychological thriller at the same time. But that comes from Barbara having the faith in me.”
Heather Graham, Judah Lewis, and Johnathon Schaech Act Out
It’s not a criticism of the performance but rather a testament to Heather Graham’s career that her fierce and unbridled portrayal of Dr. Derby in Suitable Flesh may not even be her most vulnerable. Graham has made a wonderful career out of playing people whose lives are on full display, be it Boogie Nights, Bowfinger, or The Hangover, and yet she consistently balances that transparency with subtle shades of secret feeling. She’s unleashed in Suitable Flesh, and it’s a wild, kinky, cool performance that’s impossible to look away from. It’s that rawness that attracts her to a role.
“I think what I really admire in people and art is when people are really raw and real about what they’re actually really going through, kind of what Joe is saying, it’s the more personal you make something. And I feel like I can feel that when I’m watching other people’s art that I really respond to. So that is definitely my goal, is to do stuff like that, because I feel like the more open and vulnerable and raw you are, I think the more, potentially, people can relate,” explained Graham, who added:
I think one of the points of being an actor and of what we’re doing is, we want to tell a story that’s kind of a human experience, that we all might go through in different moments, where we can relate to all the characters and just relate to these human experiences. Yeah, that’s what I hope for.
And yet, it may seem difficult to relate to any of the goings-on in Suitable Flesh, what with the eternal body-swapping entities, but the actors collaborate with Lynch to not just be extremely entertaining but also carry consistent themes. “I mean, the thing is, the situations that these characters are in are so severe and nothing that most likely any of us will experience,” said Judah Lewis, who goes from one extreme to another in the film. “But I think that if you approach the character from a place of truth, and I try to really, like when I’m going into a scene, I try to come in with a clean slate, and not know what I’m going to do in the moment, and I think in that moment, if you’re present in the way you’re reacting, it dictates what that performance becomes.”
He added:
“And it helps when you have these incredible actors opposite you. And one thing that was so amazing about working with both Heather and Barbara is that they’re incredibly generous actors. It’s like, we’re 11 hours into shooting, and it’s my coverage, and they’re still giving 110%, which is everything, because then my performance can still be truthful, and I’m not just acting with nothing. It really kind of becomes this communal creation.”
Meanwhile, Johnathon Schaech pinpointed the way that Heather Graham and himself collaborated to form a couple who are quietly out of sync with each other, but who suddenly discover hidden aspects of themselves when the entity invades their lives (and bodies). “These two had just gotten along so well and had their careers and everything, but we built it so that he was in a turning point in his life, where he had been laid off right after the pandemic,” explained Schaech. “It was like, this man was trying to figure out his life and trying to find out who he is. Or like Joe’s poster says, ‘Do you know who you are?'”
So he was exploring that, and when Heather’s character shows up and has this entity inside her, it was invigorating. It was such a challenge. It took him out of his norm, and it gave him a sense of self, and he identified with that, that submissive part of his nature, which he had never really explored before. So it was a great thrill ride to do that.
Who Are You, and Who Would You Be?
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In a bit of a silly lightning roung, we asked the actors and Joe Lynch whose body they would want to possess if only for mere minutes, either living or dead. They gave us some sweet responses:
Judah Lewis: Johnathon Schaech!
Johnathon Schaech: Heather Graham!
Heather Graham: Wow, I don’t know, I think it’d be fun to be Katy Perry. That’s just random, out of the top of my head.
Barbara Crampton: Maya Angelou, for all the love she had for everybody in the world and her promise of a better tomorrow for everybody.
Joe Lynch: As for me, I would say Stuart Gordon. Just to feel what it felt like to be in his shoes spiritually. I met Stuart years ago, many times at the Masters of Horror dinners, and whenever he would walk in a room he had such a wonderful gravitas. This actually is perfect, because he worked with George Wendt before a lot of times, and George Wendt, as we know from Cheers, anytime George walked into a room they’d go, “Norm!” Stuart Gordon was the George Wendt, the Norm of our community. And to have that kind of embrace instead of being like, well, me, who wasn’t a master of horror, more a masturbator of horror.
Joe Lynch: But Stewart was just so loved in the community, and at the same time, that man knew what he wanted at all times, whether it was on the set or in life. And to be able to step into his shoes for a little while — I got close, but that that would definitely be someone I would want to body swap for a little bit. At least, not now, that would be weird and very claustrophobic, but you know, maybe back then.
Lynch’s morbid humor, thoughtfulness in response, and affection for the great Stuart Gordon come in clear with this response, just as they do in his film. Suitable Flesh was released in theaters Oct. 27th and is available everywhere you rent movies.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
