The early buzz for DC Studios’ Clayface, its first theatrical horror film, is landing on one word: ick. Collider’s Steve Weintraub called it “hard R” and said audiences “freaked out,” while critic Chris Killian promised “body horror moments that’ll make you squirm.”
Early reactions are comparing it to The Fly and Darkman.
The R-rated, 108-minute origin story follows Gotham actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), whose mutilated face is restored by an experimental treatment that melts him into living clay. James Watkins (Eden Lake, Speak No Evil) directs from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini.
It’s rated R for “strong bloody violence, gore, language, some nudity and brief drug use,” and it opens Oct. 23.
The scene drawing the loudest reactions: Hagen’s eyelids seal shut on a plane and he cuts them open with sewing scissors. Harries calls it “the film’s tipping point of ickiness.” Watkins shot it with real and rubber scissors, and even the crew looked away.
Watkins is keeping the full creature out of the trailers, explaining, “You don’t want to show the shark.” Harries, on the final form fans haven’t seen yet: “It’s fucking sick!… Trust me, we don’t go soft.”
