A pinballing, weaving camera which eventually ends up giving us a cadaver’s eye view, straight through the zipper of a body bag, is a pretty sizeable clue that Suitable Flesh (2023) is going to be an unashamed piece of horror, and to its credit, this turns out to abundantly be the case. Based around H P Lovecraft’s story ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ – itself a kind of greatest hits compendium from Lovecraft’s universe – it retains the body-hopping, consciousness-blitzing high weirdness of the story, but adds a lot more colour, overt violence and – avert your eyes, Howard – sex scenes. Egad.
Anyway, back to the morgue: two doctors, one of whom is played by Lovecraft/Gordon alumni Barbara Crampton, are discussing the gloopy mess within and also how it relates, sadly, to a colleague and a friend, Dr Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), now on the psych ward for her role in the death. Soon afterwards, when Dr Danielle Upton (Crampton) attempts to speak to Elizabeth, Elizabeth acknowledges what she’s done, but she’s still afraid – afraid that ‘he’ is coming, and that she still isn’t safe.
Beth is perfectly able to recount her tale, when her friend tries to find out what has caused all of this. She explains that she’s had a good life: she’s been a successful psychiatrist, has a loving husband and a beautiful home, all until: she opened her clinic door to a young man without an appointment (without an appointment! Imagine that happening on the NHS.) This troubled Miskatonic student, Asa (Judah Lewis), begs for her help: he has read her work on OOBEs (Out of Body Experiences) and thinks she’s just the person to assist him in his plight; curious, she agrees to hear him out. Ominously, his tale of another ‘he’ who wants to take over his body already sounds familiar; Derby, though, being extremely well-versed in modern psychiatry and its tenets of repressed memory, projection and so on, is drawn into believing that Asa’s problem, with this ‘he’, who turns out to be his father, is the result of parental abuse: this draws her in. She’s troubled by the encounter, and decides to look Asa up, actually visiting his house to look for him.
What she finds at Asa’s house soon escalates the situation; neither Asa’s sick, goading, sinister father nor Asa seem able to stay themselves for very long, so that even Beth’s tenacious grasp on her diagnostic criteria are soon tested beyond their limits. Asa, in particular, undergoes personality shifts: where he was once fragile and fearful, he now seems to have morphed into creepy, inappropriate and… weirdly enticing to Beth. Professional distance would have saved her from a lot of things which happen here, but as it stands, her personal and initially, sexual interest in Asa sends her spiralling into a world of body horror, lost autonomy and good old fashioned, Stuart Gordon-esque Lovecraftian splatter – even if it never quite lets itself fully go, never quite goes that extra lunatic mile, as much as this doesn’t prevent the film from being a lot of fun throughout.
There are some minor criticisms: Suitable Flesh burns through its elements of surprise in the early part of the plot relatively quickly which leaves us, once we’re in little doubt about what is actually going on here, with some repetitiveness: person goes into spasm, person develops wry, pervy face because we-soon-know-why (the acting around this situation can be somewhat variable, too). Added to this, despite the surprise rapidly burning away, it can get a little confusing about who is who/where, at points. But there’s genuinely lots to love here, not least the reappearance of Stuart Gordon’s writer-in-chief Dennis Paoli, who brought us Re-Animator, From Beyond and – a personal favourite – Dagon! Paoli’s skill at transforming HPL’s unknowable, unnameable yet often rather staid horrors into something lurid, tangible and uproarious – without sacrificing the spiralling paranoia, loss of selfhood and insanity – is very much intact. We get enough snippets of the occult (nice grimoire!) alongside a reasonably solid backbone of cosmic, existential horror to counterbalance their expression in a fairly gory, madcap body horror love-language.
All in all, Suitable Flesh is a crowd pleaser: it rattles along at a decent pace and it gives us some good female characters – again, this is down to director Joe Lynch, writer Paoli and some solid lead performances in Crampton and Graham, one an actor with a lifetime’s worth of Lovecraft horrors under her belt and one who clearly relished the opportunity to get stuck into something a little different. If it’s not quite a dead ringer for the uproarious Lovecraftian gore of the 80s, then fine, it doesn’t have to be; it has plenty of merits, decent ideas and charm of its own. I’m glad we have it.
Suitable Flesh (2023) will be released on October 27th, 2023.