Over the last few years, DC has successfully carved out a unique space in cinema with R-rated villain-led films. The studio released four of them between 2019 and 2024, each one handing the lead role to a classic comic book antagonist. Todd Phillips' Joker kicked the run off in 2019 and made history at the box office. Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey followed in 2020, then James Gunn's The Suicide Squad in 2021, and Phillips' musical sequel Joker: Folie à Deux in 2024.
Each one looked and felt nothing like the last, uniting only in their willingness to hand the spotlight to the bad guy and let the result get bloody, profane, or both. The next R-rated project on DC's slate will elevate this storytelling trend by bringing a tragic and complex comic book character into the spotlight.
Clayface is one of the oldest names in the Batman rogues' gallery, a shape-shifting monster first introduced in 1940. He's appeared in numerous comics, animated shows, and video games without ever landing a live-action movie, but the long wait ends soon. DC Studios' upcoming body-horror Clayface will bring the character to the big screen for the first time on October 23, with Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries playing the doomed actor Matt Hagen under the direction of James Watkins.
Fans now have their first moving look at the film as DC Studios debuted Clayface's teaser trailer during Warner Bros.' Tuesday night CinemaCon presentation at the Dolby Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran introduced the film as a "riveting horror thriller driven by character, not genre." The footage does live up to his description and slots Clayface into a special corner of DC's film history as the fifth R-rated movie the studio released in which the villain is the lead.
The teaser picks up with Matt Hagen in a hospital bed, bandaged and bloodied after a knife-wielding assailant attacks him. A figure stands over him, pumping chemicals into his body, the substance that will turn a struggling Gotham actor into the melting, shape-shifting creature called Clayface.
From there, the footage intercuts between glimpses of Hagen's life before the accident, including a shot of him drifting down a neon-lit alleyway lined with circus signage, and moments of his body betraying him after the procedure, with his eyes, mouth slipping out of place, and his lips merging. At the same time, his face pulls apart like wet clay.
The sequence closes with Hagen in a bathtub, wiping his features away into a textured smear, and a dark shot of the finished monster forming his hand into a mace, which many fans will recognize from his animated and comic appearances.
As the trailer has already shown, Clayface will focus on Matt Hagen as an ascending actor whose face is mutilated by a gangster. Desperate, he turns to a fringe scientist, played by Naomi Ackie, who offers an experimental procedure that does not go as promised.
DC Has a New Entry in Its R-Rated Corner
The trailer's description is a tone DC has utilized before, except that Clayface has a darker tone and a new kind of genre ambition. Per the footage, the movie shares many similarities with the other four R-rated films released by DC. The descent of a lonely, dead-end man from ordinary life into an irreversible new identity is what gave life to Todd Phillips' Joker in 2019, in which Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck made the slow walk from failed stand-up comic to criminal icon. That film became the first R-rated movie ever to cross $1 billion worldwide, mainly on the strength of this character spiral. Clayface's opening shots of a broken man in a hospital bed, betrayed by his own ambitions, follow the same tradition.
The Gotham setting, the neon lighting, and the violence of Hagen's attack also point toward a different predecessor in Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey. That film turned Gotham's back alleys into a candy-colored playground for Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn and her new allies, and it used its R rating for strong language, bloody action, and the kind of over-the-top confrontations studios usually avoid in comic book fare. Clayface is working in the same Gotham, just swapping Yan's bubblegum colors for shadow and dread.
The fantastical body-morphing in Clayface is also pure James Gunn, even if he isn't directing this one himself. The Suicide Squad pushed DC's R rating further than any movie before it, with a giant interdimensional starfish, a man-eating King Shark, and the kind of practical gore that reminded audiences Gunn cut his teeth on horror long before Marvel hired him. The body-horror shown in the trailer is reminiscent of how far Gunn went with The Suicide Squad.
Even the music choice in Clayface's trailer is similar to that of a DC predecessor. Joker: Folie à Deux used music to evoke emotion, pushing Phoenix and Lady Gaga's Harley Quinn into duet after duet to interrogate Arthur Fleck's fractured mind. Clayface isn't a musical, but the trailer uses a haunted, drawn-out, and slowed-down version of "Do You Realize??" that does similar work to Joker: Folie à Deux's use of music. Instead of a typical loud superhero trailer, it uses music to evoke eeriness in Hagen's story and transformation.
Clayface Could Be DC's Most Ambitious Villain Movie Yet
Every DC villain movie before Clayface worked inside a genre audiences were already familiar with. Joker was a psychological character study. Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad were action comedies. Joker: Folie à Deux was a courtroom musical. Although all the above-mentioned are R-rated, like Clayface, the movie is a straight-up body horror, which is a very different kind of R-rated project. The creatives Gunn hired to bring the film to life are evidence of how deep DC wants to lean into horror.
Mike Flanagan, the filmmaker behind The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, wrote the original script. James Watkins, who directed the brutal Eden Lake and the 2024 English-language remake of Speak No Evil, is behind the camera. Tom Rhys Harries, a rising Welsh actor rather than a recognizable movie star, is the lead.
There's also a lot of ambition on the economic side of things, as the film has a $40 million budget. For a Gunn-era DC release, this is tiny by blockbuster standards. It is small enough to force the filmmakers to lean on practical effects, a solid premise, and a lot of character work, which isn’t an easy thing to pull off. If the final film delivers on the horror its first trailer is promising, it will be one of the most unique entries in James Gunn's DCU.
Geraldo Amartey is a writer at The Direct. He joined the team in 2025, bringing with him four years of experience covering entertainment news, pop culture, and fan-favorite franchises for sites like YEN, Briefly and Tuko.
