DC Studios dropped the trailer for Clayface on April 22, 2026, and it is immediately clear that this is not a conventional superhero movie.
It is a body horror film, the first R-rated entry in James Gunn’s relaunched DC Universe, directed by James Watkins from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan, and it is built around one of Batman’s oldest and most visually disturbing villains getting a proper big-screen origin story for the first time.
The film hits theaters October 23, 2026, a Halloween-adjacent release date that fits the tone of everything in the trailer.
James Gunn posted it on X with a single line, “Look fear in the face.”
What Does The Trailer Show?
The trailer opens with Matt Hagen, played by Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries, lying in a hospital bed with a bloody, bandaged face.
Quick flashbacks establish what happened. He was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant and his face was badly disfigured.
From there the trailer shows him receiving injections of mysterious chemicals from a scientist played by Naomi Ackie. The experiment is intended to fix his face. It does more than that.
What follows is about forty seconds of one of the more genuinely disturbing trailers to come out of a major studio comic book film in some time.
His face morphs rapidly on screen, at points he has no mouth, at points he has no eyes, skin and bone rearranging in quick cuts.
In the trailer’s final moment, sitting in a bathtub, he drags his hand across his face and wipes it away entirely.
There is also a silhouette shot of Clayface morphing his hand into a massive mace-shaped fist, the full creature design is being held back, but the scale of it is clear.
The whole thing is soundtracked to a spacey, unsettling remix of The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??”
This is not a trailer that is shy about what kind of movie it is.
Who is Making The Clayface Movie?
The combination of talent attached to Clayface is what elevated it from an interesting premise to a genuinely anticipated project before a single frame of footage had been released.
James Watkins directed it. His credits include The Woman in Black — the 2012 British horror film that remains one of the more effective ghost stories of the past fifteen years, and Speak No Evil, his 2024 remake that demonstrated a willingness to go to genuinely dark places.
He also directed an episode of Black Mirror. He is a filmmaker with a specific sensibility around dread and physical menace, and those sensibilities map directly onto what Clayface requires.
Mike Flanagan wrote the screenplay, with co-writer Hossein Amini. Flanagan’s television and film work, The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, most recently The Life of Chuck which won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, has established him as the most consistently excellent horror storyteller working in American television and film.
He pitched the project to DC Studios in March 2023, and the project was formally confirmed as part of Gunn’s DC Universe in December 2024.
The script is described as channeling the tone of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, a tragic transformation story that is as much about grief and identity as it is about the physical horror of a body turning against itself.
Matt Reeves, who directed The Batman with Robert Pattinson, is a producer.
Reeves had been interested in Clayface for years, at various points considering the character as a villain in his Batman sequel and exploring a standalone project.
The character ultimately landed in Gunn’s DC Universe rather than Reeves’ separate Batman continuity.
Who Is Playing Clayface?
Tom Rhys Harries is a Welsh actor whose credits include White Lines, The Gentlemen (the Guy Ritchie streaming series), Uberto Pasolini’s The Return and Suspicion.
He beat out a notable field for the role, other actors in consideration included George MacKay, Tom Blyth, Leo Woodall and Jack O’Connell, all of whom would have been credible choices.
When Gunn announced the casting, he said he and Reeves were “blown away” by Harries during the audition process.
The version of Clayface he is playing is Matt Hagen, the shapeshifting iteration of the character, not the original Basil Karlo version from 1940.
The Matt Hagen version was established in the comics in 1961 and is the Clayface most audiences know from animation. This is the first time an actor has played Matt Hagen in live action.
Naomi Ackie plays Dr. Caitlin Bates, the scientist responsible for the transformation, the character who injects Matt with the experimental chemicals that give him his shapeshifting abilities.
Ackie’s profile has risen considerably in recent years through Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Mickey 17 and Blink Twice.
She was the top choice from reading sessions held in Liverpool in the summer of 2025, and her casting locked when Max Minghella was also confirmed, he plays a Gotham City police detective in a relationship with Ackie’s character. David Dencik and Eddie Marsan round out the cast.
The History Of Clayface
Clayface first appeared in Detective Comics #40 in June 1940, making him one of Batman’s oldest antagonists.
The original version, Basil Karlo, was a successful actor who adopted the identity of a character he had played in a horror film after turning to crime. He wore a clay-like mask of that character.
The shape-shifting powers, which define the character most people know, were not established until the 1961 version of the character.
On Batman: The Animated Series in the 1990s, Ron Perlman voiced the character. Brian McManamon played a version on Fox’s Gotham series in the 2010s.
Alan Tudyk currently voices Clayface on the HBO Max animated comedy Harley Quinn. This film, which Variety describes as the character’s “big-screen introduction,” is the first time Clayface has headlined a theatrical feature.
Where It Fits In Gunn’s DC Universe
James Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios and began building a new connected universe with a clean slate.
The first film, Superman, released in 2025. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, directed by Craig Gillespie, releases June 26, 2026. Clayface is the third theatrical film in the new DC Universe, releasing October 23.
Gunn has been transparent about wanting DC Studios to work across different tones and genres, not every film in the same register. Clayface is the horror lane.
It is the first R-rated project in the DCU, and Gunn has used it specifically as an example of the range the studio can operate in. The film sits apart from Matt Reeves’ Batman franchise, the Robert Pattinson continuity is its own separate strandm and is positioned as a more standalone entry rather than something deeply connected to the wider DCU mythology.
Upcoming DCU projects after Clayface include the Lanterns HBO series launching in August 2026, the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow on July 9, 2027, and The Batman: Part II from Reeves on October 1, 2027.
The Clayface comparison that keeps circulating is Todd Phillips’ Joker, a villain origin story that works as serious cinema rather than superhero entertainment, R-rated, grounded in character psychology rather than spectacle.
Whether Clayface achieves that is a question October will answer. The trailer does nothing to lower expectations.
