The Clayface Trailer Looks Absolutely Horrible — In the Best Possible Way

The first full Clayface trailer wastes no time showing how badly Matt Hagen’s life is about to come apart.

DC Studios has released the first full look at Matt Hagen’s transformation, and there isn’t much traditional superhero spectacle in it. No colorful costumes. No armies pouring through portals. No mysterious beam blasting into the sky while everyone searches for the off switch.

Instead, we get ruined flesh, experimental medicine, deteriorating sanity and a human face that seems to have decided it no longer wants to remain attached correctly.

This could be very good. Call me cautiously optimistic.

Matt Hagen Has a Terrible Week

Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, a Gotham street kid who becomes a successful Hollywood actor before a local crime boss leaves him horribly disfigured.

Once his career and support system disappear, Hagen seeks out an experimental treatment that restores his appearance.

Unfortunately, the procedure also begins dismantling his grip on reality and sends him toward revenge.

It’s the age-old promise of experimental medicine, except one minor side effect may include becoming a homicidal mound of sentient clay.

The trailer spends enough time with Hagen before the transformation to establish what’s being taken from him. His appearance isn’t simply part of his life. It’s his livelihood, his identity and the thing everyone around him values most.

Once that’s gone, the treatment doesn’t merely offer healing. It offers him a way back into the only world he knows.

That desperation is what makes the best horror work.

About Those Scissors

There are several unpleasant images in the trailer, but the scissors are going to receive most of the attention.

Hagen appears to be sitting on an airplane while preparing to cut into his own eyelids. That sentence already contains far more information than any reasonable person should be forced to process.

It’s quick, nasty and intimate in a way that a giant computer-generated monster rarely is. The scene doesn’t require a city to collapse. It only requires a pair of scissors, a bathroom mirror and the realization that Hagen is no longer responding to his body like a sane person.

Director James Watkins and Harries have confirmed that the moment is part of the movie’s body-horror approach.

Whoever ends up sitting next to Matt on that flight should receive a full refund and several years of free therapy and flights.

Bath Time!

What the hell is up with that bathtub scene!

Hagen sinks into the water as his face begins bending, stretching and sliding out of position. His features still resemble a human being, but only in the way a wax figure resembles one after being left too close to a furnace.

This transformation is absolutely taking its toll on him.

He doesn’t wake up stronger, admire himself in the mirror and begin testing new abilities. He appears trapped inside a body that’s stopped recognizing the borders between skin, bones and liquids.

Clayface has always been capable of becoming nearly anything. The trailer is concentrating on the far more frightening question:

What happens before he learns how to control it?

We Still Haven’t Seen Clayface

The trailer offers several partial transformations but doesn’t provide a clean reveal of Hagen’s final form.

That isn’t an accident.

The traditional Clayface design will appear in the movie, but DC Studios is keeping it completely out of the marketing campaign. Watkins has described the final creature as a towering form with a gaping mouth and deep, cavernous eyes, but he doesn’t want audiences to see it before they’re sitting in a theater.

Watkins compared the decision to hiding the shark. Trailers give away too much, and Clayface is one character who should be allowed to remain a mystery until the movie is ready to show him.

That’s the correct move.

Clayface isn’t a character who benefits from being introduced through a polished publicity photo against a white background. The audience should encounter him at the same moment the people around Hagen realize there’s no longer a man standing in front of them.

Harries has already seen the completed creature and says he can’t wait for everyone else to finally see what the production built.

We already know he becomes a monster. The mystery is just how much of Matt Hagen survives inside it.

The Creature Commandos Connection

DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran has confirmed that this Matt Hagen is the same Clayface introduced in Creature Commandos.

That answers one of the bigger questions surrounding the movie, since the animated series never identified which version of Clayface we were watching. James Watkins has described the movie’s Hagen as an amalgam, with the filmmakers pulling pieces from several different versions of the character instead of following one comic-book history exactly.

That gives the movie room to use Matt Hagen’s name and Hollywood background while still building toward the much larger, stranger creature already seen in Creature Commandos.

It also creates a fairly substantial personality gap that the movie will eventually have to explain. The broken actor in this trailer doesn’t immediately resemble the sleazy, video-game-playing Clayface from Creature Commandos.

Then again, losing your career, your face, your sanity and eventually your entire human form is sure to change a person.

Does This Need Batman?

A standalone Clayface movie still sounds strange, but then so did Joker.

The DC Universe hasn’t introduced its new Batman outside of a brief glimpse in coincidentally the same episode of Creature Commandos that introduced the DCU’s Clayface, yet one of his villains is already receiving an entire theatrical origin story. It’s difficult not to wonder why Gotham is opening with the shape-shifting mud actor instead of the billionaire dressed like a bat.

Batman isn’t expected to appear, but the movie won’t completely ignore the larger world around Matt Hagen. Watkins says there are light Easter eggs, names and background references for people familiar with Gotham, including apparent nods to Batman and some of his other villains.

The important part is that those references aren’t supposed to interrupt the story or turn the movie into a two-hour scavenger hunt for DC logos.

The trailer may offer a reasonable answer.

Matt Hagen’s story doesn’t require Batman to exist. It already contains fame, vanity, organized crime, medical experimentation, betrayal and revenge. Adding Batman too early could actually reduce Hagen to another criminal waiting to be punched. Batman was also never really a part of the Matt Hagen Clayface origin anyway.

The movie has the opportunity to let Clayface become the center of his own tragedy before he becomes part of someone else’s ever-expanding rogues gallery. Batman can and will arrive later. Matt has enough problems right now.

The People Making This Are Encouraging

James Watkins directs from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, with Flanagan also receiving a story credit.

The supporting cast includes Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan, Nancy Carroll and Joshua James.

Flanagan’s involvement immediately explains why the material appears more interested in tragedy and bodily corruption than comic-book mythology. Watkins previously directed Speak No Evil and The Woman in Black, so he isn’t arriving without experience making audiences uncomfortable.

The trailer also avoids treating the horror as something that needs to be interrupted every thirty seconds by a joke.

That alone puts it ahead of several modern comic-book movies.

Final Thoughts

There’s still plenty that could go wrong.

A grim trailer doesn’t guarantee a frightening movie. The finished Clayface design could look ridiculous. The revenge story could become predictable. The connection to the larger DC Universe could overpower the smaller and more personal tragedy being presented here. But this trailer has a clear identity.

It knows Matt Hagen should be pitied before he’s feared. It knows transformation should be revolting before it becomes impressive. Most importantly, it knows Clayface isn’t merely a Batman villain with an unusual power set.

He’s a man whose own body becomes an enemy he can’t escape. That’s a far better foundation than another origin story about someone learning to accept their abilities. Matt Hagen doesn’t need to accept what’s happening to him.

He needs to survive it.

Clayface arrives in theaters on October 23, 2026.