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Almost by definition, superhero movies are about hope and goodness. Even when things get dark for guys like Batman or the Punisher, their respective films end on notes of redemption. The Hulk may roar and Wolverine may growl, but eventually, the real baddies are defeated and the innocents are saved.
Not so with Clayface, the latest entry in the DCU. The first trailer for the adaptation of the classic Batman villain doesn’t reveal much about the film’s plot but it does make sure we understand the tone. Clayface will be a horror movie, complete with sharp music stings, plenty of gore, and some disturbing images of melting faces.
Clayface stars Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, a rising film star whose career falls apart after he experiences a horrible accident, resulting in the bandaged imagery seen in the trailer. Through scientist Dr. Caitlin Bates (Naomi Ackie), Hagen participates in an experimental procedure that transforms his body into moldable clay… at first. Where the comic book Clayface uses his new condition to commit crime, the trailer suggests that Hagen’s melting body creates a sense of visceral terror.
The trailer’s tone shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given the pedigree of the creators. Clayface comes from co-writer Mike Flanagan, the man behind the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. To hear DCU co-head James Gunn tell it, Flanagan came to him with a pitch for Clayface that was so compelling, he had to put it into production. To helm the project, Gunn chose James Watkins, recently of the Speak No Evil remake.
Moreover, the trailer seems to be bringing Clayface back to horror roots. When the character debuted in 1940’s Detective Comics #40 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, he was Basil Karlo, a B-movie actor who lost the ability to distinguish between the real world and the movies, becoming the killer he played on screen. Another Clayface, Matt Hagen, first appeared in Detective Comics #298 (1961), courtesy of Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff. This Clayface transformed into a hulking slime beast after exposure to a strange plasm.
Clayface is hardly the only superhero character who borrows from horror fiction. Batman and villains like the Joker have clear connections to the scarier side of pulp fiction. The Hulk began as a riff on Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde, with some Frankenstein thrown in for the design. The Fantastic Four and Ant-Man stemmed from the Twilight Zone-style stories that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were telling throughout the ’50s.
And yet, few movies have been willing to fully embrace the horror side of superheroes. While indies such as Spawn and Faust: Love of the Damned mix capes with creatures of the night, only the Blade franchise and The New Mutants really went into horror—and even then, they return to superheroics by story’s end.
If this trailer is to be believed, Clayface will do something very different. It will remold the comic book superhero movie into something new, shocking, and completely unexpected.
Clayface arrives in theaters on Oct. 23, 2026.
The post Clayface Brings the Horror Genre to Superhero Movies appeared first on Den of Geek.
