DC’s Clayface leaves Batman out entirely — the same bet that got Resident Evil to 96%
DC’s Clayface is playing the same card that made Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil successful, as Warner Bros. unveils the final trailer for James Watkins’ body horror movie.
Here comes something a bit unexpected out of the DC stable. Clayface, as in that old Batman villain, is getting his own movie. But do not go in expecting capes and car chases — if anything, it’s more in line with last year’s Resident Evil knock-out. We've got body horror, a proper doom spiral, and a studio angle that’s definitely worth a closer look.
Clayface arrives just before Halloween, with body horror front and centre and Batman nowhere in sight.
Clayface does horror, not just comic books
So, Warner Bros. has dropped the final trailer for Clayface, directed by James Watkins. It stars Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, an actor left mangled after a nasty accident. Unable to work, he turns to a desperate sort of surgery — and it all goes wrong. Side effects: absolutely monstrous, quite literally turning his own body to clay. You'd barely clock this as a Gotham story if you just watched the trailer. There’s no Batman lurking in the shadows, it’s not interested in the wider Bat-universe — really, it’s a horror flick first and a DC thing way, way after that.
Borrowing from Resident Evil's playbook
The playbook here is pretty much what Zach Cregger did with Resident Evil. That film didn’t pick up after the Paul W.S. Anderson stuff or those Jovovich films. Instead, Cregger nabbed the raw spirit of the video games and mapped out a totally new story, using the setting but none of the baggage. That gamble paid off: Resident Evil opened to a massive $60 million US, $108.3 million worldwide, and a quite ridiculous 96% Rotten Tomatoes score, despite some purists grumbling.
You don’t have to be a DC die-hard to follow Clayface, either. According to DC chief James Gunn, yes, it does tie into the broader DCU (though apparently out of normal sequence), but the standalone story is the bit they’re banking on. Combine that with a late October release window — right when everyone’s hunting for a proper scare — and you sense they know exactly what they’re doing. No Batman, but plenty of existential horror: a man’s body morphing into something he can’t control while his mind slides off the rails.
- Clayface: out October, pushing body horror over superhero tropes
- No Batman — it’s a Gotham story, but sideways
- Tom Rhys Harries leads, directed by James Watkins
- Approach mirrors Resident Evil’s reboot: new story in a familiar universe
- Resident Evil drew $108.3 million worldwide and a 96% critic score
- DCU boss James Gunn confirms it’s linked to the bigger DC universe, but not forced into continuity
If Clayface lands, DC could end up with a very different sort of connected universe: one where horror and tragedy get as much air as blokes in tights.
Read more: Robert Pattinson’s Batman in the DCU? Pattinson thinks it would be ‘kind of tough’