INTERVIEW: Dennis Paoli, of ‘Re-Animator’ fame, on leaving a horrific impression
Photo: Suitable Flesh stars, from left, Heather Graham and Barbara Crampton. Photo courtesy of AMP and Eyevox / Provided by KWPR with permission.
For horror fans, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton are household names. These creative minds came together for a series of cinematic adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror-filled stories, dating back to Re-Animator in the 1980s and continuing for a few more films, including From Beyond.
Sadly, the horror world lost Gordon, the director of these movies, a few years ago, and this meant that Paoli’s script for yet another Lovecraftian adaptation was destined to never see the light of day. Twenty year sago, Paoli had worked on the adaptation of the story “The Thing on the Doorstep,” but for a variety of reasons, the movie was never shot. After Gordon’s death, it appeared the project was headed for the filing cabinet.
Then Crampton, star of Re-Animator and other Gordon-Paoli films, entered the picture. She had revitalized her acting career and transitioned to a producing role for low-budget horror, and she came knocking, asking whether Paoli had anything worth a second look. He dusted off his “Doorstep” adaptation, called Suitable Flesh, and Crampton started to make some phone calls. Eventually director Joe Lynch, of Mayhem and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End fame, was signed up, as was Heather Graham, of Boogie Nights and Swingers fame.
The project, with new interpreters at the helm but still in the spirit of Lovecraft and Gordon, was a go.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox spoke with Paoli about this long, long journey of bringing “The Thing on the Doorstep” / Suitable Flesh to the screen. Audiences can check out the movie in theaters or on VOD, and a release on the Shudder streaming service is being planned as well. Paoli’s many credits include Castle Freak, Dagon, The Dentist, The Pit and the Pendulum and Ghoulies II, among others. He’s a horror writing icon, and here’s what he had to say about Suitable Flesh …
On how long the journey has been with this cinematic project …
“Decades long. That script was first written in the mid-’90s. Stuart Gordon, the director I worked with for so many years and my oldest friend, was in Spain shooting Dagon, the film version of ‘Dagon’ and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, some of Lovecraft’s most famous stories. He was shooting it in Spain, and we were looking for the next Lovecraft project to adapt. And we both like the story ‘The Thing on the Doorstep,’ and we liked the narrative. We loved the central character. It was a tight, little story, so we looked at this. He said, ‘Take a shot writing that.’ I wrote it while he was gone. He came back; I gave it to him. He loved it, and over the years tried to get it produced, got it optioned three different times and couldn’t get it made, couldn’t raise the money for it. It was always the same objection, and if you’ve seen the film, I’ll let you guess what the objection was. But it just couldn’t be made, so I put it in a drawer.”
On how the project was re-animated …
“Stuart unfortunately passed away at the beginning of the pandemic. I miss him to this day, and at a couple Zoom memorials for him, I reconnected with Barbara Crampton, who was in a number of our movies, and was terrific. It was always great working with her. Subsequently — besides being a historically important Scream Queen and viable actress, a wonderful actress in a number of different genres — had become a producer of low-budget horror, and she said, ‘Dennis, do you have anything in the drawer?’ And I pulled out this script for ‘The Thing on the Doorstep,’ and I gave it to her. And she liked it; she liked it a lot. She agreed to shop it. She was able to connect Joe Lynch to direct it. Once she connected Joe Lynch to direct it, we were pretty confident that it was going to get done because Joe is a hot commodity. … He’s got a meteoric career, and once he connected Heather Graham to it, then we knew it was going to get made.”
On how the script changed once Joe Lynch was brought on board …
“Joe gave me one more idea, one more twist to put in the script. … Lovecraft’s ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ is a mind-swapping tale, and if it’s a mind-swapping tale, of course, it’s a body-swapping tale. But it’s also a gender-swapping tale. At the core of it is a gender swap, and Joe suggested switching the genders of the main characters, which is actually within the spirit of the original story itself. In our adaptations of Lovecraft, Stuart and I always thought you need to be faithful to the spirit of Lovecraft, but you can’t always be faithful to the letter. Movies aren’t letters; they’re images, and we needed to show people the horrors that Lovecraft was just suggesting. … That’s what Lovecraft wants you to do, and then show it on screen. So that’s what we made our careers doing. We felt we were always faithful to the spirit of Lovecraft, if not to the letter. It was the same working with Joe, but Joe’s style is spectacularly expressionistic. He knew Stuart Gordon. He was one of those young directors who Stuart loved to take to lunch and just talk about filmmaking and encouraged him. It’s such a discouraging business sometimes, but Stuart was always a source of great encouragement. He was very generous with his genius, so it felt very comfortable working with Joe, especially because I was working with Barbara again, too.”
On when he first read Lovecraft’s stories …
“I discovered Lovecraft in high school. I was a math and science guy in high school and when I started college, but I also loved to read. If you’re a math and science guy, and you love to read, it’s science fiction. You’re reading science fiction, and science fiction takes you directly to Lovecraft. And Lovecraft takes you directly to fantasy and horror and cosmic horror, so, yeah, Lovecraft was an early love. And when I met Stuart, who I also met in high school, we discovered that we had the same senses of humor, that we liked the same literature, and we loved the same movies. We used to love to go to the Hammer films, the Christopher Lee Dracula films, so, yeah, Lovecraft goes way back before we made the first Lovecraft movie. So when Brian Yuzna came and saw Stuart’s theatrical works … and suggested that he make a film, and that that film be a Lovecraft adaptation, Stuart was so ready. Stuart was very ready for that, and I think that’s why Re-Animator was such a successful project.”
On the difficulties of adapting Lovecraft for the screen …
“My day job for 49 years was teaching at Hunter College of the City University of New York. I taught, and I ran writing programs. And one of the courses I taught for 20 years was Gothic Fiction. So I know Gothic Fiction from early mythology to Stephen King and Dean Koontz. It’s an overlooked, but truly fundamentally important genre in the history of literature, and Lovecraft I think is one of the most important American impressionists. His stories give you the impression of horror, the impression that horror makes on the narrators. You do not really see the parade of horrors that terrifies the narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. You don’t see the apocalyptic cosmic horror that drives the narrator of At the Mountains of Madness mad at the end of that story. You don’t see those things. You may see a tentacle slide out of frame at some point, but you don’t really see it. You see the effect on another character. That’s Impressionism. It’s like painting Impressionism where you see brush strokes or Seurat dots, and the viewer is expect to help create the painting. Well, the reader is expected to create the horror in a Lovecraft story. You get license from Lovecraft, not only license, but you get the requirement to imagine the worst horror that you can imagine. He sets you right up for that, and you almost can’t help yourself but discover new fears inside of you, fears you didn’t know you had.”
On the importance of being expressionistic on screen …
“Film has to be expressionistic; you have to show it. It’s not letters; it’s images. The history of horror film is expressionistic. The earliest films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, those are German expressionist films, so you have to express your horror and show it to other people. So we inverted Lovecraft. We took Lovecraft’s stories and inverted the format from Impressionism to Expressionism, and we took Lovecraft at his word. We thought we understood his spirit, which was to imagine the worst that we could from reading his stories. If you know From Beyond, our followup to Re-Animator, we tell the whole Lovecraft story in the pre-credit sequence. The whole rest of that film is what we imagined from that story, the worst horrors we could imagine given that story. We thought that was fairly successful, and Lovecraft’s fans, even his literary fans, have been very friendly to us. They’ve accepted that explanation.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Suitable Flesh, written by Dennis Paoli and directed by Joe Lynch, is now playing in movie theaters and available on VOD.
