Clayface Looks Like It’s Going to Be Gnarly

The final trailer for Clayface is out, and I’m in. A body-horror movie about one of Batman’s grossest villains, written by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Somebody at that studio said yes to this, and I’d like to shake their hand.

Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, an actor whose face gets wrecked in a car crash and who takes an experimental cream that lets him reshape it, right up until it doesn’t. James Watkins is directing, and he made Eden Lake, so he knows how to make an audience squirm. It reportedly cost around $40 million, which is the right size for this. Small enough that nobody upstairs has to sand the edges off.

It’s partly drawn from “Feat of Clay,” the Batman: The Animated Series two-parter, which is still one of the saddest things that show ever did. If Watkins keeps that sadness and lets the makeup get as ugly as The Fly, this could be the best thing DC has put out in years.

So which do you want more of from DC: small, strange movies like this, or the big swings?