Director Joe Lynch’s (Wrong Turn 2, Mayhem, “Creepshow”) new movie Suitable Flesh, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Thing On The Doorstep, is poised to unleash body-swapping horror this Halloween weekend.
Suitable Flesh is bringing Lovecraftian madness to theaters and VOD on October 27, 2023, and the film will later be hitting Shudder for exclusive streaming in January 2024.
In Suitable Flesh, “After murdering her young patient, a once-esteemed psychiatrist helplessly watches her life spiral into a nightmarish maelstrom of supernatural hysteria and gruesome deaths, all linked to a seemingly unstoppable ancient curse.”
The film stars Barbara Crampton, Heather Graham, Judah Lewis, Bruce Davison, Johnathon Schaech, and Jonah Ray.
Dennis Paoli, the writer of Re-Animator and From Beyond, wrote the script.
Bloody Disgusting previously spoke with Joe Lynch at Tribeca, where he teased the Lovecraft connections for Gordon’s fans and the advice Brian Yuzna gave him when making the film.
In part two of our chat, Lynch talks about casting his Lovecraft horror feature and building a Stuart Gordon Cinematic Universe.
While Lynch took care to honor Stuart Gordon with this film, he quickly made it his own, beginning with the decision to swap the protagonist’s gender.
He explains, “The original prose was a very male-skewed story. It wasn’t Elizabeth Derby; it was Edward Derby. That’s how the original script was. I wanted to bring something different to it because honestly I was like, how great would it be to take this story and not just do it just to sound progressive and cool for the time, but how can we explore sexual identity and sexual obsession from a route that we haven’t seen before, or at least I haven’t seen before? I thought how great it would be to take a woman in her late forties or early fifties because if any of this stuff happened in a movie that was set in the ’90s and starred Michael Douglas, we wouldn’t bat an eyelash.
“When we started going around with this, we kept hearing dangerous, like, ‘This is too dangerous. This is a little too provocative. This is a little too taboo.’ I’m sitting there going, ‘Stuart, this is exactly what you wanted.’ We really did feel like we were onto something when we started taking it around because we needed to find someone who not only could be able to play not just Elizabeth Derby but all those different characters in all the body swap situations. Someone who felt like they could go along for the ride and feel comfortable with the provocations, with the dangerous feel we were going for. We were going out to all these different people, and it was, I believe, Heather who came to us and said, ‘I’m really interested in this.'”
Lynch continues, “It just felt like it was the right match, especially when we started talking about the role and how she really wanted to approach this, not just from a doctor’s standpoint but someone put in the crosshairs of their own mortality. The fact that here’s a person who is completely complacent with their role in life and maybe found a modicum of success, and then all of a sudden has a new obsession. We are all human, and we go down these roads sometimes, and we make these choices that might not be the best choices in the world, but we still make them, and there are consequences to them. She just felt like the perfect fit.”
Lynch revealed that it was his Mayhem star that led to his casting of Judah Lewis.
“Then on the other side of the coin, Judah Lewis, who I kept hearing raves about from Samara Weaving because they worked together on the Babysitter movies, and Samara would say, ‘Oh, man, this guy is awesome.’ We did a very extensive search for the right Asa Waite for this, because not to get too minutia about this, but we watched a lot of noir movies, film noir movies, and there are certain character tropes in those film noir like the femme fatale, like the stoic wife at home, like the detective or the doctor, or usually the male gaze protagonist who has to traverse through all of these different characters. I thought, how great would it be to flip those? Instead of a femme fatale, we have a homme fatale. Instead of the doting wife at home, we have the doting innocent husband at home played by Johnathon Schaech, who’s like the sexiest dude in the world.“
The Easter eggs and connections to Stuart Gordon’s other Lovecraft films, starting with Re-Animator, are aplenty in Suitable Flesh. But Lynch paid tribute to the horror great beyond his Lovecraft output, marking the start of a new horror cinematic universe.
“One of my favorite Stuart Gordon movies of all time is King of the Ants. It’s an early aughts movie that was weirdly produced by The Asylum before they were doing Mockbusters,” Lynch details. “They gave Stuart the opportunity to make this crazy crime noir thriller that Chris McKenna was the star of. Then, lo and behold, Graham [Skipper] was good friends with McKenna. When he told Chris about this, Chris said, ‘I want to be in the movie.’ Without too many spoilers, you may be seeing a character from King of the Ants in Suitable Flesh as well. This is all a way not just to have a MiskatonicVerse, but to have a GordonVerse as well.”
See if you can spot all the Easter eggs when Suitable Flesh releases this Friday.
The post ‘Suitable Flesh’ Director Joe Lynch on Casting His Lovecraft Movie and Building a Stuart GordonVerse [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.