Clayface: The First Villain-Led R-Rated Body-Horror Film Falls Short

By Tom Whitfield

DC Studios’ Clayface is the first villain-centered, R-rated body-horror film, according to the NPR review, whose verdict is blunt: “No. Not yet, at least.”

The review, published in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter, treats Clayface as a test for DC Studios rather than a finished statement. The reviewer calls Clayface a C-list Batman villain, then stresses the absence that defines the experiment: Batman never appears.

The review asks whether DC Studios can stretch the DC Universe beyond what it calls a diluted superhero genre and toward the more lucrative horror market, whose hold on the box office shows no sign of weakening. On its terms, the answer is no.

In the reviewer’s view, Clayface plants one foot in horror and one in superhero cinema, then goes nowhere. That split stops the film from establishing either genre on its own terms.

A distinction with company

The claimed first matters because the film has plenty of company. Earlier stories have separated antagonists from their superheroes, including the Joker and Venom films, Morbius, Kraven the Hunter and Catwoman.

The review places Clayface in an even longer field:

• Earlier R-rated superhero entries include The Jokers again, the Deadpool films, the Blade films, Logan, The Suicide Squad, Dredd, The Crow and The Punisher.
• Mature commentary on the superhero archetype includes the Kick-Ass films, Watchmen and Super.
• Superhero-horror predecessors include The New Mutants, Brightburn and Chronicle.

The reviewer’s verdict concerns form, not merely gore. Clayface offers blades cutting through skin, flesh, organs and eyelids, plus flesh that melts, thaws and resolves into goo. That material may disappoint diehard horror fans because it arrives in too small a dose.

The movie then follows a superhero pattern: adversity happens, powers manifest, and justice is served. More precisely, the film serves revenge, which the review describes with a comic edge as justice with arterial spray.

Revenge replaces the uncanny

The plot described in the review is thin but effective. Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys Harries, starts as a hot young movie star on top of his world. A run-in with a painfully generic mob boss, played by David Dencik, leaves him disfigured.

He seeks out a scientist, played by Naomi Ackie, who is developing an untested nanotechnology procedure that can merge with his body. AI powers the nanotech. The reviewer jokes that, because of that arrangement, nothing could possibly go wrong.

Face-melting, body-morphing and splattering hijinks follow. Matt exacts loamy revenge on everyone who wronged him.

The early horror has a specific strength. Hagen struggles to keep his symmetrical, Tom-of-Finland facial features from turning into something resembling late-period Picasso. Once his powers emerge, however, Clayface abandons the horror of the uncanny valley for the impact of a comic-book splash page.

The reviewer notes that more bloodthirsty audience members began to grow restless. The complaint applies to horror specialists; the change does not trouble a fan of superhero films.

Clayface is not a long film, and it starts moving its pieces immediately. The review also finds the collapse of Matt’s world hilariously truncated, as if the filmmakers feared the audience’s attention span.

The brisk approach suits the film’s purpose. It offers neither a character study nor a sustained examination of beauty and fame, although the screenplay gestures toward both ideas.

Style is the missing component

The film’s stated debts point to a different priority. The review identifies Oldboy, Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2, and the John Wick franchise as models: films that generate tension and release it through successive bursts of visceral thrills and catharsis, rather than through layered characterization or close psychological analysis.

Those films also possess the style the review says Clayface lacks: visual flair and aesthetic idiosyncrasy. Sam Raimi’s 1990 Darkman adds charm and heedless goofiness. Clayface owes Darkman a narrative debt the reviewer describes as enormous.

Its Gotham is not the mysterious, goth-inflected urban hellscape of the Batman films. It is Liverpool. DC Studios co-lead James Gunn has said that director Matt Reeves’ The Batman films exist separately from this DC Universe.

What does Clayface change for DC horror?

For audiences, the practical answer is: not much yet. The review does not accept the film as proof that DC can sustain an ongoing horror concern. It sees an opening gambit in a long game.

Like its protagonist, Clayface extends its goopy, mud-brown, protoplasmic feelers toward unknown territory, but does so “too tentatively, and is too quick to retract them the moment it meets resistance.”

That restraint limits what the experiment can become. The reviewer argues that Clayface could have delivered something more surprising and more new if it had committed fully to its transformations. For DC Studios, the next test is not another helping of gore. It is whether the studio can let horror govern the tone, form and pace instead of letting the superhero formula resume control.