There’s whole new ways of telling stories. Yeah, you know the horror genre has changed over the years, and it’s more serious, suggestive, and subtle or psychologically, like the Saw films, way perversely twisted. Yes, it definitely captured some of that old magic, didn’t it? Then I was like, ‘’Well, okay!’’ and look, you can make a film with the best intentions and with the best talent, and it just doesn’t work. You know, the writer is the first person off the project, so I didn’t see the dailies or the rushes I didn’t see any part of it until it was done. Plus Joe is happy with it, and Barbara is happy with it. Once it came out and was good, yeah! I think it’s good I’ve seen it a couple of times now. So yeah, there was a lot of emotion in making this.Īnd I suppose that made this feel like a good way to pay tribute to Stuart as well. He liked being around younger directors and talking to them, so Joe had gotten to know him and was inspired by him. I mean, Stuart was my best friend we were college roommates, but Stuart was very generous to young directors he was a mentor figure. And Joe knew Stuart too, it wasn’t just Barbara and me. Understandable after all this time! I suppose that made this quite an emotional experience for you. Even though is almost exactly the same story, it’s got elements to it that we thought really work. When you’ve had a script for decades, you sort of get locked into certain character conceptions and Joe threw a wrench into that, gave it a twist, and allowed me to see it as a refresh. Joe had some ideas that sort of refreshed the script. Joe Lynch came on as director, and bingo bongo it was gonna get made. She showed it to her producing partners, and they loved it, but it didn’t get close to getting made until she showed it to Joe Lynch. So I told Barbara, ’’I wrote this script for Stuart, you would get this, why don’t you take a look at it?’’ and she did, and she loved it. So we started doing theater work together, so we did Edgar Allan Poe and Re-Animator the Musical, which was a great deal of fun. Then we did it again in the early 2000s, and it was not made again, and every time it was not made for the same reason, and I will let you guess what that reason was. Then it was optioned and not made, we tweaked it, it was optioned…and not made again. So I started working on it, rewrote it, we were happy with it, and Stuart, with his producer hat on, started schlepping it around Hollywood and Burbank. Plus, as many Lovecraft stories are, it was fascinating and horrifying. We Identified The Thing on the Doorstep a really well-told story that had more story value to it than many other Lovecraft stories have. When I was there Barbara asked me if I had any scripts lying around, and this was a script I had written for Stuart back in the mid-to-late ‘90s because it was gonna be the next Lovecraft. Then when we were able to do a live memorial for him in LA, I flew out and attended. Then unfortunately, terribly, Stuart passed away at the beginning of the pandemic and there were several Zoom memorials for him, and I reconnected with Barbara on those. You’ll notice she and Jeffrey (Combs) worked together three times. Stuart was a great actors director, and he loved working with actors, and he tried to keep a company of actors he used again and again. It was reconnecting with her because she wears a producer hat now, and I, of course, knew her as a scream queen back in the films we made together (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Castle Freak) with Stuart Gordon. What is it about Suitable Flesh that brought you back?ĭennis Paoli: It was Barbara Crampton. Neil Bolt: You’ve never really been away from writing due to your day job, but it’s been a while since you had been this involved in film or television to this degree. ComingSoon’s Senior Editor for Horror, Neil Bolt, talked to Paoli about how Suitable Flesh finally got made, changing the script to reflect a different time, and offered advice on how to adapt Lovecraft. The finished product is Suitable Flesh, and stars Crampton alongside Heather Graham and The Babysitter’s Judah Lewis in a gender-swapping tale of cosmic horror.
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