The dominant movie genres of the past decade, superhero films and horror, have usually stayed, like bashful teenagers on the dance floor, on separate sides of the multiplex.
But when James Gunn and Peter Safran were plotting the projects with which they wanted to launch their era of DC Studios, writer-director Mike Flanagan came in with a pitch that would fuse both genres.
Neither Safran nor Gunn were looking for a standalone movie about Clayface, a lesser-known villain from the Batman comics. But they were won over by Flanagan’s vision, which eventually became a script by Flanagan and Hossein Amini.
“It fit within the broader framework of how James and I saw the broad spectrum of film and television shows we want to make,” says Safran. “But it really was Mike Flanagan’s passion and pitch. You always look for volunteers and not recruits.”
Not many studios would push “Clayface” to the front of the pack, but Gunn, who started in horror, and Safran, who helped launch “The Conjuring” franchise, made “Clayface” — with James Watkins eventually coming on to direct — part of their first wave of DCU films, following “Superman” and “Supergirl.”
“Clayface” is a darker detour for DC. And, if it proves successful, it just might open up a darker frontier for comic book movies.
“From the get-go, this was not designed to be a traditional superhero movie,” Safran says. “It was always supposed to be a character-driven story that uses the DC mythology. If you took the DC elements out of it, it would just be a great horror movie.”
That makes “Clayface” something unusual in the normally calculated realm of superhero movies. It’s R-rated. It’s modestly budgeted at $40 million. And it stars the relatively unknown Tom Rhys Harries as a little-known DC villain.
“A lot of people wouldn’t necessarily know who Clayface is, but they wouldn’t need to,” says Watkins, the Welsh filmmaker of “Speak No Evil” and “The Woman in Black.” “It’s its own movie.”
‘Supergirl’ disappointment puts pressure on ‘Clayface’
That, Safran says, is by design. He and Gunn have emphasized filmmaker-first projects at DC, carving a more idiosyncratic, multi-genre path that has won them fans but also added some degree of risk.
“Clayface,” which opens in theaters Oct. 22, will debut shortly after Skydance and David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Ellison is keeping Gunn and Safran to lead DC, even though they’re coming off a misfire in the box-office disappointment of “Supergirl.” That puts more pressure on “Clayface” to perform.
“If you look at the cumulative choices that we’ve made, I think it’s pretty clear we’re trying to do things differently,” says Safran. “Not everything is going to work. The pressure we feel for ‘Clayface’ is honestly the pressure we feel for everything we put into the world.”
There have been a few movies to meld horror and superheroes together, including Wes Craven’s “Swamp Thing” (1982), Sam Raimi’s “Darkman” (1990) and “Brightburn” (2019), a sinister twist on the “Superman” origin story that Gunn produced.
But Clayface, a Batman villain created in 1940 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, is still an unlikely character to put center stage. In the comics, he began as Basil Karlo, a B-list actor who, furious that he wasn’t cast in a horror remake he had previously starred in, wears the movie’s Clayface costume to kill the film's actors.
Winning over skeptical DC fans
Some fan skepticism has followed “Clayface.” Last week, Gunn defended the choice on the social media platform Threads after a user asked, “Who the (expletive) asked for a ‘Clayface’ movie?”
Gunn replied: “Although it may seem like it, Hollywood isn’t a place where the only way to make a movie is the public voting on what IP they want to see that they’ve seen countless times before.”
Watkins’ film, taking inspiration from the two-part episode “Feat of Clay” from “Batman: The Animated Series,” twists the original Clayface story slightly. Rising movie star Matt Hagen (Harries) is disfigured by a mob boss (Eddie Marsan) and rapidly falls out of Hollywood. After numerous unsuccessful surgeries, he resorts to an experimental process created by the scientist Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) that uses an untested, claylike living organism to rehabilitate his face.
“Part of the joy was being surprised at what’s looking back at me in the mirror every day,” says Harries, smiling.
To a large degree, “Clayface” progresses as a character study, one of an actor whose livelihood falls away from him and whose attempts to get back on the red carpet turn increasingly dark. His journey, though, hinges less on vanity than on his relationship with Caitlyn.
“I was approaching it the whole time like: Matt thinks he’s in a romantic comedy,” says Harries. “The fulcrum of the whole thing is his relationship with Caitlyn Corr. Without that, you don’t get the propulsion for Matt to be doing what he decides he needs to.”
Shape-shifting in genre and body
As “Clayface” devolves, Matt’s face and body increasingly shape-shift in chilling body horror transformations. That can include his own body changing or Matt taking the form of other characters around him. While CGI and visual effects were used, Watkins leaned into practical effects.
“I like horror when it’s most relatable, when it actually gets under the skin,” Watkins says.
In the third act of “Clayface,” that’s taken to body-changing extremes as Matt dons the appearance of those around him. Often, actors were swapping into scenes moment to moment with Harries.
“We’d often play a scene with Tom and then someone else would play the same scene,” says Watkins. “Sometimes Tom would copy them, sometimes they would copy Tom.”
If the superhero movie has sometimes been too rigidly formulaic, “Clayface” proves the genre has more elasticity than it's been shown to have. In “Clayface,” even the lead role was an ensemble piece.
“I won’t mention any actor’s name because it’s a bit of a spoiler,” Watkins says. “But one of the cast members was saying to me his son asked, ‘So who are you in the movie?’ And he said, ‘I’m Clayface.’”
