There’s some ripe softcore silliness here from veteran horror screenwriter Dennis Paoli and director Joe Lynch, inspired by HP Lovecraft’s 1937 story, The Thing on the Doorstep. Despite a very game lead performance from Heather Graham, and some amusing 90s-style erotic thriller mannerisms – voile curtains blowing on a hot summer night while a sex scene happens to a wafting sax accompaniment – this left me not knowing quite where to look.
Graham plays the entirely preposterous psychiatrist Dr Elizabeth Derby (gender-flipped from Lovecraft’s original male protagonist), professionally fulfilled and happily married to devoted middle-aged hunk Edward (Johnathon Schaech), who cooks her branzino in the evening and spends a lot of time with his shirt off. One afternoon, Dr Derby has to treat a disturbed young man called Asa (Judah Lewis) who has what appears to be dissociative identity disorder. But, in fact, he is genuinely possessed by a malign demon, in whose control Asa manages to seduce Dr Derby and then invade her body during sex.
