DCU’s Clayface Movie Reveals Best Look At His Shapeshifting Transformation

The DCU’s Clayface movie just revealed the best look yet at the villain’s shapeshifting transformation. Tom Rhys Harries stars in the upcoming body horror as Matt Hagen, a rising actor who turns to an experimental treatment after a brutal attack disfigures his face. Clayface is the first feature film from James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios to center on a Batman villain, and its marketing keeps hinting at how gruesome Hagen’s change will get.

The footage comes from a green band trailer for Clayface, a version approved for general audiences, which theaters are currently playing before showings of Supergirl. The tamer cut trims the graphic material from April’s first trailer and slips in a handful of new shots, which quickly spread online. The standout is a close-up of Hagen’s hand as it begins to bubble and morph.

The shot shows Hagen’s fingers spread across a glittering surface while the skin along his hand ripples and blisters. Small pockets swell up around his knuckles and wrist, as if his whole arm is seconds away from losing its shape.

That look is quite different from the transformations in the first trailer. Those changes appeared slick and almost instant, most memorably when Hagen wiped his own face away in a bathtub like wet putty. The new shot suggests a slower and far more painful process.

It also resembles a brief moment from the 0:32 mark of the original trailer, where a lump of clay vibrates on the surface of what seems to be a subwoofer. The way the clay reacts on that surface could be a tease at a way to destabilize Clayface's transformation. In some animated iterations of the character, sonic attacks make it difficult for him to maintain shape. It’s possible that a similar weakness could apply to this live-action version when it arrives in theaters on October 23.

Clayface’s Transformation Will Be the Best Part of the Film

There are many elements of the Clayface film that fans are looking forward to, but seeing Hagen transform into a clay monster is probably the most anticipated. DC Studios marketed the film as a full-on body-horror, a genre in which the audience watches flesh stop obeying its owner. The revenge plot and the Gotham setting are also appealing, but they exist to serve the spectacle of watching Clayface shapeshift.

Some of the genre’s best entries have used gradual transformations to amazing effect. David Cronenberg’s The Fly, for example, is so memorable because Seth Brundle falls apart piece by piece across the entire runtime, and every new stage leaves audiences dreading what comes next. 

The bubbling hand in the Clayface trailer hints that the film's director, James Watkins, wants the same slow rot for Hagen instead of a quick digital swap. This is an origin story, so naturally the transformation will take shape at a slow pace.

The movie's official synopsis echoes this, describing one man’s descent from a rising Hollywood star to a revenge-driven monster, accompanied by the loss of his identity and humanity. Hagen is an actor whose face is his entire career, so each stage of his mutation strips away another piece of who he is.

Test screening reports reflect this storyline, describing some genuinely disturbing sequences, including one where Hagen reportedly cuts his eyelids open on a plane during turbulence. None of that is confirmed until the movie arrives in October, but if the production is willing to go that far, clearly the transformation is the film's main attraction. If Watkins delivers, the shapeshifting will be what people talk about long after Halloween.