Joe Lynch Is Bringing Sexy Back With Suitable Flesh

Heather Graham in Suitable Flesh (Courtesy of Shudder / RLJE)

Joe Lynch seems to love adding the pressure of expectation to his movies. The filmmaker made his Fantastic Fest debut in 2007 with the U.S. premiere of bloody hilarious slasher sequel Wrong Turn 2: Dead End and gave the low-budget redneck horror franchise its best entry and gnarliest kills. He came back seven years later with the hyperviolent Everly, a script that had languished on the Black List of brilliant but unfilmed (and seemingly unfilmable) scripts. But there's a special responsibility for his latest: Suitable Flesh, a project begun by master of horror Stuart Gordon.

Gordon wrote and directed four cult classic adaptations of stories by the master of cosmic horror, H.P. Lovecraft: From Beyond, Re-Animator, and Dagon, plus a TV version of "The Dreams in the Witch House" for Showtime's Masters of Horror anthology series, while his 1995 sleazefest Castle Freak was profoundly influenced by Lovecraft's "The Outsider." It was actually the star of three of those projects, Barbara Crampton, who approached Lynch with the idea of finishing the script that Gordon and his longtime collaborator, Dennis Paoli, had been working on prior to Gordon's death in 2020. Lynch had already heard about the project from Gordon himself, years earlier at a Masters of Horror dinner (a sort of dining club for filmmakers who specialize in fear). The idea was to adapt Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep," and Lynch was immediately fascinated by what Gordon could do with it. "To be given that baton was a lot of pressure," he said.

He knew he couldn't be completely slavish to Gordon's immediately recognizable style, "and Stuart would be the first person to say, 'Don't listen to me, do your thing.'" However, his hope is that Gordon's influence is still apparent. "You cut from us going, 'We did it,' and then you cut to the side and there's a Jedi-like version of Stuart like at the end of Return of the Jedi going, 'Yes. I approve.'"

In Suitable Flesh, the characters are no longer Lovecraft's stuffy, suited men, but a psychiatrist (Crampton) being told an impossible story of switched souls and sorcerous lust by her colleague, now her patient (Heather Graham). Lynch described the menace as "this Lovecraftian entity that's been jumping from body to body to body." In that way, it's an expression of genderfluidity and sexual fluidity ("There's a lot of fluids in this movie," Lynch noted), albeit for its own twisted ends. "They're not going for the presidency, they're not going for world domination or some wild scheme. They're just trying new things out. They're exploiting other people's bodies for their own sexual kinks and their own sexual desires."

After all, Gordon wasn't just the greatest adapter of the master of cosmic horror: He also put kink into the uncanny. No surprise, really, since he began as an underground theatre director, mounting the first production of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and was once arrested for obscenity for a radical reinterpretation of Peter Pan. However, Lynch was very aware that this story could, like so many body swap movies that have gone before, be shot through the male gaze, and that would betray "the emotional context of being a woman in a man's shoes, or a man in a woman's shoes." To ensure the female gaze, he constantly consulted with Crampton, his creative partner Becca Howard, and every other woman involved in the production. "From script all the way to post," he said, "we were always getting that perspective."

Suitable Flesh will be released by IFC Films on Oct. 27 in theatres and on VOD. For more with Lynch, including the new puritanism and the backlash against sex in movies, the influence of Skinamax, and the film’s very deliberate queer subtext, slide over to austinchronicle.com/fantasticfest.

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