By Nicole Veneto

For all of  Suitable Flesh’s indulgence in B-movie schlock and gross-out gore, the film’s pulsating sexuality becomes its strongest asset.

Suitable Flesh, directed by Joe Lynch. Coming to Shudder on January 26.

Barbara Crampton and Heather Graham in Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh. Photo: Shudder

If you’ve spent any time in the trenches of Film Twitter then you’re probably too familiar with everyone’s favorite bit of recurring discourse: The Sex Scene. Is it necessary? Are there enough of them? Are there not enough of them? Can I watch them with my parents? Is my discomfort with watching sex scenes in a movie tantamount to the director violating my consent as a viewer? I’m not convinced that the endless debate around The Sex Scene, which makes the rounds every two weeks online, is purely the product of emotionally stunted TikTok puriteens. I’ve seen plenty of adults clutching their pearls over something as tame as Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy’s brief but narratively significant tryst in Oppenheimer. I’m much more interested in the overall decline of sex scenes in today’s multiplexes. The fact that our movies are so startlingly sexless and devoid of fleshy, rapturous passions relative to the hypersexual zeitgeist the internet age has cultivated.

RS Benedict’s influential Blood Knife essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny” diagnosed this problem as a symptom of (what else?) late stage neoliberal capitalism, as does Hit Factory’s Carlee Gomes in her excellent essay “The Puritanical Eye.” She analyzes how erotic thrillers and other mid-budget adult films have been displaced since their ’90s heyday because of vertical integration and media consolidation, the rise of the four-quadrant cinematic universe, and algorithm-driven modes of production that allocate more distribution resources to the aforementioned four-quadrant blockbuster. So, you will ask, where’s a horny sicko like me supposed to get her lusty, vicarious thrills these days if theaters don’t have the goods? As always, it’s B-movies that have my back.

Coming in just under the wire for 2023 watches is Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Thing on the Doorstep” and a spiritual successor to horror legend Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraftian trio Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon, all penned by writer Dennis Paoli. Gordon, who passed away in 2020, had been trying to get Paoli’s body-swap screenplay for Suitable Flesh made for years. It would have been a grand return to form before he died. Yet even without Gordon’s living involvement, director Joe Lynch (Mayhem, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End) seems to have been possessed by the late director’s gooey sensibilities. Both a throwback to schlocky video-store horror and to the erotic thrillers of yesteryear, Suitable Flesh is a much needed reprieve from the dry, aseptic nothingness of today’s sex-phobic cinema.

When we first meet Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), she’s locked in a padded cell à la a mindfucked Sam Neill from In the Mouth of Madness. She’s similarly a victim of Lovecraftian circumstances outside the realm of human understanding. Desperate to finish off the job against an Eldritch abomination that has pinned a string of murders on her, Elizabeth relays the events that have led her to the insane asylum to her best friend/doctor Daniella Upton (a perpetually vaping Barbara Crampton, Gordon’s gung-ho Scream Queen turned producer for the movie). A successful psychiatrist specializing in mind-body dissociation in Arkham, Massachusetts, Elizabeth leads a near perfect life: she runs her own practice, has penned a best selling book, and is happily(?) married to an unemployed but sickeningly sweet Johnathon Schaech (still as ruggedly handsome as he was in The Doom Generation) with a beautiful suburban home.

Unfulfilling sex life aside, Elizabeth believes she has everything a woman could possibly want — that is, until Miskatonic University student Asa Waite (The Babysitter’s Judah Lewis) stumbles into her office neurotically ranting that his father Ephraim (Bruce Davison) wants to control his body. Their impromptu session gets weirder when the perturbed Asa undergoes a total personality change from a complete nervous wreck into a sexually domineering bad boy when a phone call from his father induces what appears to be a seizure. Believing Asa to be a breakthrough case study in the making, Elizabeth’s professional interest quickly turns sexual once she begins hallucinating him in place of her husband mid-coitus. When she decides to pay Asa a house visit, she finds the ill Ephraim Waite poring over a book anyone with even a passing familiarity with Lovecraft will immediately recognize. Turns out Ephraim isn’t Ephraim, but an ancient entity that’s survived eons by possessing people’s bodies. And once it decides to jump into Elizabeth’s body, the presumably male-identifying entity makes a surprising discovery: it finds her flesh quite suitable to its needs, and will stop at nothing to fully inhabit it.

For all of Suitable Flesh’s indulgence in B-movie schlock and gross-out gore, the film’s pulsating sexuality becomes its strongest asset. This movie fucks, and it does so with all the kinky accoutrements of an after-hours Cinemax offering. This is hardly surprising, considering From Beyond’s S&M delights and that infamous scene from Re-Animator, both of which Lynch pays homage to in sweet little ways throughout. This sensibility extends to the filmmaking, which has the look and feel of a porny Brian De Palma flick with its split diopter shots and swooning camera work. Close-ups linger on Graham’s hiked-up pencil skirts and Lewis’ fingers rolling tobacco cigarettes. The sex scenes themselves may not be explicit, but they are incredibly steamy, emphasizing the carnal delights that come with (literally) losing yourself in someone else’s body. Lynch seems fully aware of what’s at the heart of mainstream cinema’s puritanical streak: even a film as steeped in sex scenes as Poor Things is confined to depicting the pleasures of rutting at an emotionally dry distance. Not so for Suitable Flesh, where the plot comes to hinge on the sexual reawakening of Graham’s character. On that note, Graham delivers a wonderfully deranged physical performance, but it is Judah Lewis’s ability to switch from cowering victim to a sneering, sexually dominant Eldritch monster that steals the show.

As a horror-comedy, Suitable Flesh is about as true to Gordon’s legacy as you could hope for. It’s probably the sexiest movie of 2023, although that’s just my personal bias as a body horror connoisseur. And I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of just how queer the whole thing is, considering how much the body swap conceit lends itself to a transgender reading. With its pulpy eroticism and gory antics, Suitable Flesh has deftly provocative sights to show you if you’re in for a bloody good time.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.