Clayface

DC Studios' Clayface premiered theatrically in India (in English and Hindi) on 23 October 2026. It's based on a character from Batman comics but it's very much a horror movie first and comic book movie second. That makes it stand out in a year when there have been lots and lots of comic book movies.

In brief, the official summary of Clayface is that after a disfiguring attack leaves Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) without his career or sense of self, an experimental treatment restores his face and jeopardises his grasp on reality.

It sounds a bit convoluted, but essentially. Matt is a successful leading man in Hollywood, despite having grown up as a street kid in Gotham. When a local crime boss horribly disfigures him and his friends and co-workers abandon him, Matt seeks out a cutting-edge treatment that can restore his face. But it blurs the line between Matt and Clayface and sends him down a path of revenge. What happens next is for the movie to find out!

The movie is directed by James Watkins, director of Speak No Evil (2024), The Woman in Black and Eden Lake, The Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe and Speak No Evil with James McAvoy. All are tense, effective thrillers about seemingly-normal people getting trapped with someone they can't trust, and I would imagine that Clayface will be similar.

If you're a superhero studio looking for a horror movie director (rather than, say, an action director you can dress up to look like a horror movie director), this is probably who you call. The screenplay is by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini.

Flanagan, of course, wrote and directed Netflix horror shows and movies like The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher. He tends to focus on horror stories about family, guilt and grief. A movie about a man losing his face (and sense of who he is) seems right up his alley.

His new series adaptation of Carrie is also out this month, so it's been an eventful October for Mike F! Amini wrote crime movies like Drive (with Ryan Gosling in the lead) and understands the psychology of characters being pushed to commit violence.

Harries, who has mostly worked in British film and television steps into the lead of Matt Hagen/Clayface, and this will probably be his biggest role yet. It's also probably a good decision to have someone that American movie-goers aren't that familiar with play a movie about someone losing their sense of identity. You don't want the audience projecting who the actor is off-screen onto this character.

Harries is joined in the cast by Eddie Marsan (as Frank Fitzpatrick), Naomi Ackie (as Caitlyn Corr), David Dencik (as Markos Szabo) and Max Minghella (as John Borrelli).

Ackie, Marsan, Dencik and Minghella have all appeared in lots of movies/shows over the years. But the highlights for me would be Ackie as Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance With Somebody and headlining the psychological thriller Blink Twice, Marsan just generally being an amazing British actor that elevates every project he's in (he's in everything!), Dencik as a Bond villain in No Time to Die and Minghella starring in The Handmaid's Tale.

For the rest of the crew, the music is being composed by Volker Bertelmann, who won an Oscar for his relentlessly grinding, anxiety-provoking score for All Quiet on the Western Front, which sounds like it'll be a good fit!

Cinematographer Rob Hardy has shot lots of great stuff in the past (Ex Machina, Mission Impossible Fallout, etc) but basically specialises in making really sleek looking stuff look terrifying. Editor is Jon Harris. The movie clocks in at 109-mins, which is fairly brief for a superhero movie but pretty ideal for a horror movie.

Producing are Matt Reeves, James Gunn, Peter Safran and Lynn Harris. Gunn and Safran are the heads of DC Studios, while Reeves directed The Batman. I'm sure Gunn and co. are aware that you can't have every movie in their new DCU being a team up/superhero movie. So hopefully this is the start of them branching out and experimenting a bit!

Basically, it sounds like Clayface will be a character-focused, somewhat slow-burning horror movie (director James Watkins specialises in gradually ratcheting up tension) about identity and fame. It will likely feature body-horror (a movie about a guy whose face gets destroyed and rebuilt would probably have body-horror regardless, but this crew seem like the type to really lean in).

It also looks like we'll be exploring a side of Gotham City we don't usually see, namely the dingy behind-the-scenes stuff, instead of swooping around the top of buildings in capes. That seems like it could be really interesting.

And like lots of Batman villains, Matt Hagen/Clayface is a tragic figure, a guy who had it all but lost everything. That's usually a good place to start if you want to make compelling super-villains!

The character of Clayface has existed in DC-comics since the 1940s, and there's been lots of Clayfaces. But Matt Hagen is probably the most well-known, an actor who gets the ability to reshape his clay-like body. He has been a foe of Batman's in lots of incarnations, comics, The Animated Series, etc. However, this will be his first live-action movie where he's the focus!