This article contains spoilers for “Clayface.”
The DC Universe has expanded with not just a new film, “Clayface” directed by James Watkins, but a whole new genre: horror. Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a former poor kid from Gotham City who has grown up into a rising star in the film industry, makes a big mistake when he sleeps with a gangster’s girlfriend. His face mutilated, Hagen’s rise pivots into a devastating fall. Desperate to get his life back, he opts for an experimental treatment by Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) that slowly makes his face as changeable as clay.
“Clayface” pulls from the proud tradition of body horror films where a normal person experiences a physical and often horrific transformation, losing their humanity in both mind and soul. At the same time, even if it plays out more like a horror film than a superhero film, it’s still based on a DC Comic. So here are five films that are perfect follow-up watches to “Clayface,” with the aim of recommendations as concoctive a blend as the movie’s own genre influences.
Darkman
If there’s one movie bound to scratch the same itch as “Clayface” — and scratch it even better — it’s Sam Raimi’s 1990 “Darkman,” which /Film’s review of “Clayface” compared said film to.
Made because Sam Raimi couldn’t get his hands on the Shadow or Batman, “Darkman” stars Liam Neeson as Dr. Peyton Westlake, who is working on a new kind of synthetic skin to treat burn victims. After being brutalized and horribly scarred by some gangsters, Peyton becomes “Darkman,” using his invention to disguise himself and strike at his persecutors. He also uses the lab-grown skin masks to recreate his own face to resume a normal life with his girlfriend, Julie (Frances McDormand), but that doesn’t quite work out. It’s like a mix of a superhero origin story and a Universal horror movie, where a man becomes a monster and faces ostracization. “Clayface” tries to build a similar bridge between genres.
The similarities between “Darkman” and “Clayface” are abundant. Both characters can disguise themselves as other people thanks to skin-shaping super-science. The difference is that Darkman wears advanced masks, whereas Clayface’s whole body is malleable. Matt Hagen also starts out as an actor, whereas Darkman is a scientist who creates his own means of transformation. “Clayface” takes after the “Batman: The Animated Series” episode “Feat of Clay,” but in that show Matt (Ron Perlman) was scarred in a car accident. “Clayface” changes that to gangsters cutting up his face, i.e. the same setup as Darkman.
The last chunk of “Clayface,” with Matt using his powers to seek revenge against the gangsters, plays out just like “Darkman.” The movie’s emotional core is Matt and Caitlyn’s burgeoning (and ultimately unfulfilled) — a relationship that echoes Peyton and Julie’s love story.
The Fly
In the run-up to the release of “Clayface,” many invoked David Cronenberg’s 1986 “The Fly” as a comparison to explain what the film was attempting to do. James Watkins himself has praised Cronenberg’s film, writing on Letterboxd: “[h]orror, humor, heart, ‘The Fly’ has it all.” That makes “The Fly” itself your natural next watch if you enjoyed “Clayface.”
Journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) begins dating eccentric scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who is working on a teleportation device; two pods, interconnected, with one transporting teleported matter and the other receiving it. Seth puts himself through the device, but a fly is trapped in the pod when he does it. He walks out genetically fused to the Fly, gradually transforming into a human-insect hybrid.
“The Fly” is renowned for its use of practical effects in Seth’s gradual transformation. By the end his human “shell” breaks off entirely like a cracking chrysalis, and he becomes a human-sized insect. (Effects artist Chris Walas and make-up artist Stephan Dupuis ultimately won an Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling for their work on “The Fly.”)
Those effects still hold up and are a big reason why Cronenberg’s film has supplanted the original 1958 “The Fly.” Now, admittedly, an actor (David Hedison as Dr. André Delambre) in a fly-head mask can’t compare to what the 1986 remake accomplishes technically. But the ’58 “Fly” otherwise holds up. Both films have excellent dramatic throughlines, with a similar arc of seeing a loved one fall to obsession and (allegorical) disease that “Clayface” echoes with Matt and Caitlyn’s doomed romance.
Batman Returns
Warner Bros.
As a movie about a Batman villain with no Batman in it, the obvious comparison one might make is between “Clayface” and 2019’s “Joker.” But I’d argue there’s a better Batman-centered companion piece: Tim Burton’s 1992 “Batman Returns,” where the director let his freak flag fly on what should have been nothing more than a franchise blockbuster.
Batman (Michael Keaton) is in the movie, but he doesn’t feel like the center of its gravity. He’s an observer to the stories of the two true main characters: Selina Kyle/Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin (Danny DeVito). Both bear only superficial similarities to the comic versions of Catwoman and the Penguin, but Burton’s twisted takes are plenty compelling all their own.
Selina is a secretary tossed out a window by her boss, Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), and gets a supernatural set of nine lives. Upon her resurrection, the mousy woman blossoms into a feline fatale. Matt Hagen’s arc in “Clayface” echoes Catwoman’s in “Batman Returns” — both are left for dead and in the process transformed into something new. Both characters are also drawn to an impossible romance. Batman and Catwoman are smitten, for they match each other’s dysfunction: both of them are “split down the middle,” only able to feel comfortable in their skin when said skin is fitted under black animal outfits. Like Clayface and Caitlyn, that sort of destructive romance could never work out for long.
The Invisible Man (1933)
What’s scarier than a man who can change how he appears? A man who can conceal his appearance entirely, as seen in James Whale’s “The Invisible Man.” Based on an early science fiction novel by H.G. Wells, Whale’s picture stars Claude Rains as Griffin, the Invisible Man. Universal Pictures offered audiences groundbreaking monster movies (sound and all!) in the 1930s, and the black-and-white “Universal Horror” era holds up today. They’re also intrinsic to the creation of Clayface, the character.
When Clayface debuted in 1940’s “Detective Comics” #40, he was Basil Karlo, a horror movie actor who took on the name and costume of a villain from one of his movies. Note too that his name is a riff on Boris Karloff, the actor who played Frankenstein’s Monster for Universal. Of these classic monster movies, “The Invisible Man” is the closest to “Clayface.” Matt’s bandaged face and plastic mask evoke the classic image of Griffin, who wraps his head in bandages and sunglasses when he wants to let people know he’s there.
Like Matt’s shapeshifting in “Clayface,” Griffin’s invisibility comes from scientific experimentation rather than the supernatural. James Whale had previously directed “Frankenstein,” and “The Invisible Man” hews closer to that than “Dracula” or “The Wolfman.” The Invisible Man also stands out as possibly the scariest of the Universal monsters, for he can appear anywhere and strike at unsuspecting victims. The ending of “Clayface,” where Caitlyn looks around the streets of Gotham and wonders if anyone near her might be Matt, conjures similar feelings of paranoia.
The Substance
“Clayface” shares the broadest strokes with Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” — a science fiction body horror movie about an actor taking extreme steps to change their supposedly flawed appearance and revitalize their career. But Matt Hagen is a leading man who loses the looks that made him a movie star in a savage attack. “The Substance” main character Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) simply reaches her 50th birthday, which makes her too old for ageist, misogynistic studio heads.
Elizabeth begins using a “substance” that allows her to live in her body half her age, “Sue” (Margaret Qualley), for alternating weeks. Despite being told to “respect the balance,” she begins spending more and more time as Sue; after all, living as her alter ego only increases her dissatisfaction with her real body. Like in “Clayface,” Elizabeth’s dependence on the Substance is treated like a drug addiction, including the same culmination of a disastrous overdose, a monstrous transformation, and a bloody horror of a third act.
Now, “Clayface” is R-rated and uses that to get away with the helpings of gore that a proper horror movie should have: Matt’s initial assault where gangsters take knives to his face, subsequent scenes of him brutally killing people with his powers, etc. But that all looks tame next to the blood and guts featured in “The Substance.” Just to give you a taste, upon ingesting the Substance for the first time, Elizabeth’s body cracks open and Sue emerges from it. It’s a sight that’ll make you as woozy as a mud monster with pieces of his former human self swirling inside.
