Suitable Flesh’s director explains the ludicrous kill scene he sat on for a decade
Tonally speaking, the sublimely messy, moderately silly, extremely gory horror movie Suitable Fleshis all over the place. Some of the violence is deadly serious, and some of it is designed to induce shocked, delighted giggles. It starts out deliberately paced, and doesn’t hit manic speeds until the final act. And that, according to director Joe Lynch, is all entirely intentional.
“Life is not tonally consistent,” he told Polygon at the 2023 Fantastic Fest, shortly after the movie’s Texas premiere. “Stories that derive from our lives are not tonally consistent. I might be having a horror movie of a day when you’re having a romantic comedy of a day. We’re still living in the same world. That’s what excited me about this.”
“Tonally inconsistent” is usually a negative critique of a film, but for Suitable Flesh, the shifts come with the territory. Heavily modeled after the similar horror-to-comedy-to-horror shifts in Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft-based horror classics Re-Animator and From Beyond — and written by the same screenwriter, Dennis Paoli — Lynch’s film is meant to tap into, and even push beyond, a particular giddy breed of cult horror movies that have largely fallen out of favor in a move toward immersive horror realism.
“I’ve always had a little Stuart Gordon on my shoulder, going, Hey, push that further! or Maybe too much?” Lynch said. “That was always permeating my head. Whenever I was coming up with an idea, or being slavish to the script, it was always there in the background.”
[Ed. note: Mild spoilers ahead for one of the movie’s more over-the-top kill scenes.]
That “push it further” ethos gets particularly strong during a late-film chase sequence involving protagonist Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), a
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