REVIEW: Suitable Flesh Pays Demonic Tribute to a Grandmaster of Goop
Joe Lynch channels the late, great Stuart Gordon for a bout of Lovecraftian psychosexual horror
by Cian Tsang
It’s felt for a while now as if there’s been a blight metastasizing through the horror genre, threatening to destroy so much of what makes it so often both pleasurable and profound. Too many modern horror filmmakers seem to feel that they’re above the history and tradition of the genre, convinced that they’re required to somehow elevate the horror movie, to drag it from the mud and exalt it into the prestigious realm of art—as if it can’t possibly reside there in the first place without their intervention. It’s an all-too-prevalent attitude that’s bred a new species of horror movie, made by people who seem to have no particular love for horror at all and at times even seem disdainful of what that genre label implies; blind to the inherent beauty of horror, whose simplest pleasures of shock and gore have always revealed truths to us that wouldn’t otherwise be perceptible.
Few filmmakers trafficked in that visceral beauty as aggressively and gleefully as Stuart Gordon, that fiendish provocateur who departed this world back in 2020. More than anyone else, Gordon recognized the inherent potential of horror to be an instrument of subversion and transgression. He was a master of lurid experimentation with a burning hatred for the comfort zone, plumbing bottomless pits of guts and goop for feelings of orgasmic ecstasy and cosmic dread. His movies—particularly his adaptations of the works of H.P. Lovecraft—were unvarnished, anarchic, and utterly tasteless, all while managing to be just as artful and thoughtful as the efforts of his more refined contemporaries.
Gordon’s sensibilities and style of filmmaking feel almost prehistoric now, with no obvious successor in sight. Yet even amidst the elevated horror epidemic, there are still a few torchbearers hellbent on preserving the ways of the old ones. Joe Lynch is one such acolyte of Gordon’s cosmic cult, a director whose weapons have been forged in the satanic fires of low-budget sleaze, and whose new movie Suitable Flesh feels tantalizingly like Gordon’s unholy spawn. Adapted by regular Gordon collaborator Dennis Paoli from the Lovecraft short story The Thing on the Doorstep, the movie details the exploits of a diabolical entity who perpetuates its ungodly existence by jumping from human body to human body, and who eventually occupies the flesh of middle-aged, sexually unsatisfied psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), whose life is consequently upended in a vortex of erotic violence.
Lynch’s obvious reverence and adoration for Gordon, and indeed for horror in general, is endearing (try not to grin at every mischievous, De Palma-esque split diopter shot), even as it tends to expose his lack of a distinctive style of his own. It’s refreshing to watch a horror movie that feels like it was made by someone who genuinely loves the scuzziness and nastiness of it all, who dispenses with pretense and revels in the granular details of carnage. The movie’s violence is satisfyingly viscous and chunky—nowhere near as deliciously overwrought as it could’ve been, but nonetheless a welcome throwback to the decapitated heads and strewn vital organs that made Gordon’s movies such riotous spectacles. There’s also, crucially, an impishness to the movie that’s so often absent from the deadly serious approach that many modern filmmakers now bring to the genre, a perverse hilarity that cuts through the nausea. The art of the horror gag has been somewhat lost to history, but Lynch briefly resuscitates it here with a bravura sequence involving a reversing camera and a body being obliterated to a pulp.
It’s refreshing to watch a horror movie that feels like it was made by someone who loves the scuzziness and nastiness of it all.
It’s from this sense of mischief that Suitable Flesh carves its complexities. There’s a double reanimation of necrotic flesh at play here, as the demon’s revival of seemingly unsalvageable corpses coincides with the return of Elizabeth’s libido, which she’d long ago consigned to the morgue. Her sex drive is reawakened from the depths by the demonic incantations of her young patient Asa (Judah Lewis), who’s convinced that his ailing father Ephraim (Bruce Davison) has been intermittently occupying his body. A sexual encounter with Asa acts as a conduit through which the demon hijacks Elizabeth’s body, but the terror of relinquishing agency over to an odious power is offset by the feeling of potential being suddenly and dramatically unlocked. In being displaced, Elizabeth is jolted into sexual rediscovery; finding ecstasy in the unholy, unearthing impulses and pleasures that she’d almost entirely forgotten, buried under the rubble of age and societal convention. Only in being possessed, in surrendering her body to become a receptacle into which the entity can pour its vicious intent, does she find herself capable of raging against the idea that women past a certain age can’t still have appetites; an idea to which Elizabeth had entirely capitulated, resigned to freezing like a cadaver while her husband (Johnathon Schaech) goes through the motions.
You’d think that there couldn’t possibly be any sort of emotional overlap between an atavistic evil and a middle-aged woman living a picture-perfect life, but the psychic tether that eventually develops between the two proves utterly fascinating. Both find themselves in the process of whittling away at the innermost recesses of their identities, exploring aspects of themselves that they didn’t know existed. Elizabeth is intrigued and then inflamed by the strangeness of her youthful patient, while the demon—who before possessing Elizabeth had never taken control of the body of a woman throughout its entire existence—discovers in the psychiatrist a unique thrill: the possibility of experiencing orgasmic ecstasy for the first time all over again in new, exhilaratingly deviant ways.
That the movie is so acutely attuned not just to the sensations and revelations of its heroine, but also to those of its demonic presence, almost feels as if it doubles the impact of each experience, collapsing despair and euphoria into something entirely novel, something more thrilling than the sum of its parts. Graham’s performance is appropriately slippery, shifting between two modes of discovery: one laced with human anxiety, the other charged with inhuman cunning. (Lewis, too, is delightfully heterogeneous, oscillating between febrile panic and unsettling arrogance.)
As Elizabeth’s personal life is upended, so too is her professional life. On some level, the movie is about the failure of our institutions, how terror takes hold when our conventional systems of analysis and treatment prove inadequate in the face of unknowable phenomena. Both Elizabeth and her best friend and colleague, Dr. Daniella Upton (played by horror icon Barbara Crampton, another regular Gordon collaborator), are forced to come to the crushing realization that all of their studies have left them woefully unequipped to comprehend or combat the forces at play here. No textbook psychoanalysis of projected egos and suppressed fantasies can explain or diagnose the tangled mess of possessions that they’re forced to navigate. The entity exposes the frailty of the systems and structures upon which we rely, how easily they collapse when things beyond our understanding creep into (or in this case rampage through) our lives.
Suitable Flesh never truly mutates into the gloriously excessive abomination that it could’ve been, nor ever quite explodes into an untethered nightmare. Still, even if Lynch’s limitations are as obvious as his influences and result in a movie more functional than it is virtuosic, he does no disservice at all to himself or to the legacy of Stuart Gordon, whose spirit can be felt in the melodrama and cruelty of it all, even as the movie exerts a little too much discipline where it matters. This is a movie that knows what it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s humble, efficient, frequently devilish and disgusting, and more thoughtful than you might expect. That it’s eclipsed by Gordon isn’t so much an indictment of its deficiencies as it is a testament to the enduring greatness of an eternal grandmaster of goop. While movies like this are still being made, life courses yet through the horror genre’s veins.
Cian Tsang is an essayist and Ligotti superfan based in the UK. You can find him on Twitter @CianHHTsang.
