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New York — Usually the main film genres of the last decade, superhero and horror films, have remained, like bashful teenagers on the dance floor, on different sides of the multiplex.
But when James Gunn and Peter Safran were planning the projects with which they wanted to launch their era of DC Studios, writer-director Mike Flanagan came in with an area that would connect the two genres.
Neither Safran nor Gunn were looking for a standalone film about Clayface, a lesser-known villain from the Batman comics. But the win was overshadowed by Flanagan’s vision, which eventually became a script by Flanagan and Hossein Amini.
“It fits into the broader framework of how James and I saw the broad spectrum of film and television shows we want to do,” says Safran. “But it was Mike Flanagan’s passion and interest. You always look for volunteers and not for employees.”
Not many studios would push “Clayface” to the front of the pack, but Gunn, who started out 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 movies, after “Superman” and “Supergirl.”
“Clayface” is a darker outing for DC. And, if successful, it may open up a darker frontier for comic book movies.
“From the beginning, this wasn’t designed to be a traditional superhero movie,” Safran says. “It was always meant 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 real horror movie.”
That makes “Clayface” somewhat unusual in the usual field of superhero movies. It is rated R. It has a medium budget at $40 million. And it stars the relatively unknown Tom Rhys Harries as a little-known DC villain.
“A lot of people might not 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.”
That, Safran says, is by design. He and Gunn have emphasized filmmaker-first projects at DC, carving out a more dramatic, multifaceted path that won them fans but also added a level of risk.
“Clayface,” which opens in theaters Oct. 22, comes shortly after Skydance and David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Ellison keeps Gunn and Safran to lead DC, although they are coming off fire in the box office disappointment of “Supergirl”. That puts more pressure on playing “Clayface”.
“If you look at the incremental choices we’ve made, I think it’s very clear that we’re trying to do things differently,” said 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 several films 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 Gunn’s original “Superman” story.
But Clayface, a Batman villain created in 1940 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, remains an unlikely character to take center stage. In the comics, he started out as Basil Karlo, a B-list actor who, fearing he wasn’t cast in a previous horror remake, dons the movie’s Clayface costume to kill the movie’s actors.
Some suspicious fans have followed “Clayface”. Last week, Gunn defended the choice on the social media platform Threads after a user asked, “Who asked for (expletive) a ‘Clayface’ movie?
Gunn replied: “Although it may seem like it, Hollywood is not a place where the public votes on which IP they want to see that they’ve seen a few times before.
Watkins’ film, inspired by the two-part episode “Feat of Clay” from “Batman: The Animated Series”, twists the original Clayface story a bit. Movie star Matt Hagen (Harries) is fired by a mob boss (Eddie Marsan) and quickly drops out of Hollywood. After several unsuccessful surgeries, he uses an experimental process created by scientist Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) that uses an untested living organism that resembles clay to regenerate his face.
“Part of the fun was being surprised by what looks back at me in the mirror every day,” said Harries, with a smile.
To a large extent, “Clayface” proceeds as a character study, one of an actor whose livelihood falls from him and who tries to get back on the increasingly dark red carpet. His journey, however, is less of a mystery than his relationship with Caitlyn.
“I always approached it like: Matt thinks he’s in a romantic comedy,” Harries said. “His relationship with Caitlyn Corr is the driving force behind the whole thing. Without that, you don’t get the drive for Matt to do what he decides he needs to do.”
As “Clayface” beckons, Matt’s face and body continue to transform in horrific body transformations. That can include his own body changing or Matt in the form of other characters around him. While CGI and visual effects were used, Watkins leaned towards practical effects.
“I like horror when it’s more relatable, when it gets under the skin,” Watkins says.
In the third act of “Clayface,” that is taken to extremes that change the body as Matt views those around him. Often, actors switched to occasional scenes with Harries.
“We would often play a scene with Tom and then someone else would play the same scene,” said Watkins. “Sometimes Tom would copy them, sometimes they would copy Tom.”
If the superhero movie has sometimes been too rigid, “Clayface” proves that the genre has more elasticity than it has been proven. In “Clayface,” even the lead role was an ensemble piece.
“I won’t mention any actor’s name because it’s a good thing,” Watkins says. “But one of the cast members was telling me his son asked, ‘So who are you in the movie?’ And he said, “I’m Clayface.”
