The next film in Joe Lynch’s Miskatonic Universe hits streaming later this week, serving as just the latest horror film inspired by the iconic HP Lovecraft. Based on Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep, Suitable Flesh features Heather Graham and Barbara Crampton and serves as a spirtual successor to Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and From Beyond, both Lovecraftian adaptations in their own right.
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“It was a benefit to having, not just Barbara who had worked with Stuart before, but also to have the guidance of Brian Yuzna and also [Re-Animator writer Dennis Paoli]. All three of them were like the trifecta of Stewart’s legacy. Not just that, but we also had certain actors who were in the film, I don’t want to give it away, who were also have worked with Stuart before,” Lynch tells ComicBook.com of his take on traditional Lovecraftian fare.
He adds, “I had all these people that if you kind of combined all of their lamentations and all of their recollections of Stewart, clearly everyone loved working with him because he was a true collaborator and a true actor’s director too, especially since he came from theater. But the one thing that I could say that I learned from Stuart, and I would even say this goes all the way back to renting Re-Animator for the first time, and that is, life is a tonal roller coaster.”
Lynch then went on to continue the comparison between his film and the journey of life, saying there a quite a few genres packed into Suitable Flesh’s runtime.
“Today could be a gory, splatter horror movie. Tomorrow could be a beautiful romantic comedy. Then the day after that, Friday could be a crime thriller. That’s how life is, and not every story has to adhere to, ‘Is this tone consistent in this story?’ Which is a note that I’ve gotten my entire life, and you know what? To be honest, it was so nice to have a project like this that had its tendrils already tethered to Stuart Gordon’s sensibility and a script that he was fostering himself,” the filmmaker concludes. “You’re reading it going, ‘All right, this is a horror movie and this is an erotic thriller and this is a comedy and this is a relationship drama,’ andย then by the end of it, when you’re done, you’re going, ‘It’s all of it.’ That’s what life is.”
Suitable Flesh is set for release on October 27th.
