‘Suitable Flesh’: Heather Graham Finally Gets the Trippy of Her Career

With Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dagon (among others), the late Stuart Gordon demonstrated a deep love and understanding of H.P. Lovecraft’s unnerving work and in particular its enchanting visions of the wonderful, ancient horrors that lie just outside our realm. That spirit is properly channeled by Suitable Flesh, director Joe Lynch’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s 1937 short story “The Thing on the Doorstep” that’s written by Gordon’s favorite screenwriter Dennis Paoli and co-stars his leading lady Barbara Crampton. An affectionate homage that captures the psychosexual delirium of its genre inspirations, it’s a throwback chiller steeped in blood, kink, and the terrifying thrill of violation.

Debuting in theaters and on VOD right in time for Halloween (Oct. 27, to be precise), Suitable Flesh is headlined by an excellent Heather Graham as Dr. Elizabeth Derby, a therapist who’s been locked up in a psych-ward padded room by her best friend Dr. Daniella Upton (Crampton). Elizabeth is panicked about a mysterious man who wants to get her, and to help Daniella better understand her situation, she relays her tale, which is subsequently told in flashback. A successful professional married to unemployed husband Edward (Johnathon Schaech), Elizabeth had her world torn apart by the unexpected arrival at her office of Asa Waite (Judah Lewis), a young man who sought her assistance because of her book-writing expertise on out-of-body experiences. Asa is intensely familiar with this phenomenon, and he soon demonstrates why, convulsing and contorting before Elizabeth’s eyes, after which he temporarily appears to become someone else.

Elizabeth initially diagnoses this as the most severe case of multiple personality disorder she’s ever seen. Moreover, she can’t get Asa out of her head, and Lynch—who’s already employed a De Palma-grade split diopter shot for maximum ’70s-’80s flair—proceeds to stage a sex scene between Elizabeth and Edward in which a TV plays crashing waves in the background, a ceiling fan spins overhead, and Elizabeth imagines her partner turning into Asa. The anachronistic aesthetics and attendant twisted-hothouse atmosphere are spot on; Lynch gets the slightly stilted and mannered look, feel and affected performances that marked Gordon and his ilk’s output. At the same time, however, he refuses to render his saga a one-note photocopy joke by resorting to outright shout-outs—save, that is, for a few character names (Huxley, Crowley) that subtly nod to genre ancestors.

Read more at The Daily Beast.