Clayface can be anyone, from a handsome Hollywood star to a grotesque, squelching, disembodied mass of muck (as in Batman – One Bad Day: Clayface). The Batman villain has taken many shapes since his Golden Age first appearance in Detective Comics #40 in 1940, where makeup expert and fading star Basil Karlo assumed his movie monster role of Clayface: a clay-masked, costumed character. But in the James Gunn-produced Clayface movie that horror maestro Mike Flanagan wrote for DC Studios — an R-rated body horror — the mud-bodied creature might make squeamish types cover their eyes.
“I was going through a deck for the movie Clayface, which is being made now at DC. And they were showing me a bunch of reference photos from different horrible things, and they were real,” Gunn, who made his feature directorial debut on the 2006 sci-fi horror Slither, said during a new career retrospective for GQ. “They were just laughing at me because I just can’t look, I’m closing my eyes the whole time. They’re like, ‘James Gunn is the one who’s so grossed out that he can’t look!’”
Gunn mentioned Slither as a “love letter” to body horror movies like David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Larry Hagman’s Beware! The Blob despite the director calling himself “really squeamish. But if I know it’s not real, my brain changes. It’s interesting.”
In the first R-rated DC Studios movie, the shape-shifter will be Matt Hagen, the second Clayface of the comics. The DCU Clayface is inspired by the Batman: The Animated Series episodes “Feat of Clay,” in which Hagen is an actor and master of disguise whose dependency on a putty-like face cream turns him into a monstrous metahuman criminal. James Watkins (The Woman in Black, Speak No Evil) is directing with Tom Rhys Harries (Jekyll and Hyde, The Gentlemen) cast in the title role.
Gunn previously described Clayface as “pure f—ing horror,” calling Flanagan’s take on the body-snatching shapeshifter “so real and true, and psychological, and body horror, and gross.” Added fellow producer Peter Safran, “Clayface may not be as widely known as Penguin or Joker. But we really feel that his story is equally resonant, compelling. And in many ways more terrifying.”
“One of the things Peter and I talked about when we first got the [Clayface] script was, ‘If we were producing [DC] movies … when we were doing Belko Experiment and all of that stuff, and somebody had brought us this horror script called Clayface, about this guy, we would have died to have produced this movie,” Gunn said at the time. “Because it was just a really excellent body horror script. And the fact that it’s in the DCU is just a plus.”
Following Superman (July 11) and Supergirl (June 26, 2026), DC Studios’ Clayface is set to be the third film in the new DC Universe when it oozes into theaters Sept. 11, 2026.
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