Suitable Flesh (2023) The Spirit of Stuart Gordon in this tawdry, knowing Lovecraft adaptation (Review)

It’s remarkable how much untapped potential lies in the work of H.P. Lovecraft -one of horror’s slipperiest and most indefinable writers. His weird tales of eldritch oddities and cosmic calamities have been the influence for many on the page, but few successes on the screen – despite a recent (if low-key), Lovecraft boom on TV and film (led by HBO’s cancelled Lovecraft Country and cancelled director Richard Stanley’s Colour Out of Space). The only person who brought his writing to vibrant life is Stuart Gordon – the late, great horror-comedy auteur behind Re-Animator and From Beyond, who has no less than five Lovecraft adaptations in his oeuvre. His spirit lives on in Suitable Flesh – an erotic possession farce by Mayhem and Everly helmsman Joe Lynch that occupies the same intersection between laughter and terror as Gordon’s most provocative work. 

This sordid tale begins in a psychiatric facility where Dr. Elizabeth Derby (played by an amusingly intense Heather Graham), has become the patient. Looking more than a bit like Elisabeth Moss in the third act of The Invisible Man, she’s been straitjacketed up, absolutely inconsolable, and screaming about burning an unidentified body. Her colleague and best friend Danielle (Barbara Crampton – a stalwart of Gordon and on-screen Lovecraft in general), wants to know what the hell broke her mind, and so begins Elizabeth’s ludicrous tale of schizophrenic patients, an evil entity eager to explore all of life’s pleasures, and more than a few intimate trysts with people both familiar and uncanny alike. 

Despite being adapted from Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep (a piece of the large puzzle surrounding the iconic Call of Cthulhu), Suitable Flesh is remarkably … domestic. Set mostly in offices, bedrooms and more offices, there’s the sense that the budget was limited – or at least spent on assembling its surprisingly impressive cast. To be frank, it’s like a Lifetime movie that gets randier than most teen horrors and (rather more unexpectedly), switches the camera to Gaspar Noé spin-mode when it wants to make its crazier scenes seem even crazier. There’s a full-blooded sex-and-death movie lurking somewhere in there, and when people start using more and more extreme measures to stop the chain of possession, the atmosphere begins to deepen, suggesting something darker is at play. That’s always been the most difficult thing for any filmmaker to capture in Lovecraft’s writing – that unknowable cosmic dread that crushes its character’s minds and bodies with its terrible, incomprehensible weight. Suitable Flesh ends up settling for a fun, simple body-swap format with no more heft than your average Exorcist knock-off, but that’s by no means a bad thing if the cast are wanting to chew some scenery.

And chew it they do! Everyone gets their own turn at portraying the entity in search of the eponymous perfect body, stretching their range in fun, and often humorous ways. Judah Lewis gets to do his best smart-ass teenager when the demon is piloting his body, while Bruce Davidson feels positively predatory during his most despicable moments, and Heather Graham is channelling genuine Castor Troy energy when the spirit finally takes a spin in a female body. It’s fair to say that this film is more closely related to Face/Off than it is to any other Lovecraft or Stuart Gordon film, allowing its actors to take impish delight in being bad like Cage and Travolta did in John Woo’s bonkers cult classic. 

Frequent Gordon collaborators Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli take on executive producer and writer duties respectively, so fans of work from Gordon’s heyday will no doubt relish the over-the-top camp in their modernising of a Lovecraft short story. Since Gordon is no longer with us, it’s nice that Lynch, Yuzna, Paoli et al, are picking up the good work and providing audiences with yucks of laughter and disgust in equal measure. It feels like an untouched piece of nostalgia that horror cinema hasn’t dared to revisit, but in an age where every fresh addition to the genre is lauded for its subtext about addiction, trauma, depression, et cetera, it’s refreshing to see something that doesn’t take itself even slightly seriously. Sometimes demons and audiences are just out there to have a good time, and although Suitable Flesh may not be the perfect film to lead this revival, it’s nonetheless a diverting addition to the Lovecraft canon, and a pleasantly daft way to spend 99 minutes.

Simon’s Archive – Suitable Flesh (2023)