Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh is a film that builds on a major horror legacy. Prior to his death in 2020, director Stuart Gordon made some of the best H.P. Lovecraft adaptations of all time in 1985’s Re-Animator and 1986’s From Beyond, and Lynch’s new movie is made as a kind of sister sequel to those features. It’s based on Lovecraft’s short story “The Thing At The Doorstep,” has a screenplay by Dennis Paoli (the writer of Re-Animator and From Beyond) and also stars legendary scream queen Barbara Crampton. Those who are familiar with the classic ‘80s genre movies will recognize that the only major piece of the puzzle missing is the presence of Jeffrey Combs… but that isn’t because of a lack of effort.
I had the wonderful opportunity to dig into Suitable Flesh earlier this month during an interview with Joe Lynch, and it was during our conversation (as captured in video at the top of this article) that I brought up Jeffrey Combs absence from the movie. Working opposite Barbara Crampton, the actor memorably played Dr. Herbert West and Dr. Crawford Tillinghast in Re-Animator and From Beyond, and while an effort was made to get him to play a specific character in the 2023 film, scheduling conflicts got in the way. Lynch explained,
Yes, Jeffrey Combs was reached out to by multiple people many times. And we were shooting this in May of last year in 2022, and he was booked on something else, and we couldn't move it around. We tried to, to be honest, Barbara was on set – I'll never forget it – Barbara was on set, and there is a pretty provocative scene going on in the next room. I'm at video village and she's on her phone going like, 'Well, we can't, we're stuck here in Mississippi and this is the only time we can do it.'
It was a disappointing development for the production given the effort to, in Joe Lynch’s words, get “the Stuart Gordon band back together.” In addition to featuring the work of Dennis Paoli and Barbara Crampton (who is also a producer on the new movie), the film also notably has a role in an early scene for Graham Skipper, who played Dr. Herbert West in Gordon’s stage-play Re-Animator: The Musical.
As for the specific role that Suitable Flesh had carved out for Jeffrey Combs, the part was eventually played by another actor who had a past relationship with Stuart Gordon and who was an acquaintance of both Joe Lynch’s and Graham Skipper’s: King of the Ants star Chris McKenna. Lynch added,
For Jeffrey's character, we had specifically written it for him. He was gonna play the patient that Heather [Graham]'s character talks to and hypnotizes for the first time. We deliberately wrote it for him. So when he couldn't do it at the last second, I knew Chris McKenna and Graham Skipper knew Chris McKenna, who was the star of Stuart Gordon's King of the Ants. And he was a very, very close friend of Stuart's. And I thought, 'Well, why not bring Chris in?' Because, again, not only do we have a Miskatonic-verse going on, but we have kind of like a Gordon-verse going on too, where we have a lot of his friends and family involved.
Apparently, it didn’t take any negotiating whatsoever to get Chris McKenna involved, and Joe Lynch is also happy to keep speculation open that McKenna’s character in Suitable Flesh is the same character in King Of The Ants:
So [Chris McKenna] reached out to me and said, ‘Look, if Graham's gonna be in this thing, so am I.' I'm like, 'I have the perfect part for you.' And we even tailored it for you real Gordon nerds out there that he may or may not actually be playing his lead character in King of the Ants in this film, just saying – you might have to, you know, do a little investigating, but maybe he is, I don't know.
This led to a whole other line of questioning: Suitable Flesh is set in and around H.P. Lovecraft’s Miskatonic University, so does that mean that perhaps the notorious Herbert West is lurking around outside the edges of the frame? Joe Lynch not only confirmed a special Easter egg in the movie that fans should listen for, but added his hope that this will be a canon that expands with contributions from other filmmakers in the future:
If you listen very closely in the mix, in the background, you might hear someone being referenced in the background. That was one of the things that I was so excited about with this, was to be able to open up this Miskatonic-verse. Before I knew that Stephen King was bringing everybody together in Castle Rock Lovecraft was doing that in Arkham, and he was doing that at Miskatonic, and he was having all these characters kind of passing each other... There are a lot of connections throughout this film that are connecting us to Re-Animator and From Beyond and King Of The Ants and a little bit of Dagon. We're trying to bring it all there so that hopefully if other people dig what we're doing, that they can contribute to that Miskatonic-verse as well.
Suitable Flesh stars Heather Graham as Dr. Elizabeth Derby, a psychiatrist who we meet at the start of the story locked up in a padded cell. Talking with her friend and colleague Daniella (Barbara Crampton), Elizabeth tries to explain that she is not psychotic and how her life became derailed following a fateful session with a new patient named Asa (Judah Lewis). It’s one of the best horror movies of the year, and it will be available on video on demand and in limited theaters this weekend. Do yourself a big favor and make it part of your plans for Halloween 2023.
