Four days before “Clayface” opens, Warner Bros. is selling its first DC horror movie with a single, very long look at one man in an airplane bathroom. The 98-second video, titled “Clayface | The Plane,” went up on the studio’s YouTube channel on October 15th with a three-word pitch, “Eyes wide open,” and Gizmodo greeted it on Monday as a new trailer that “goes heavy on the eyeball horror.” It is not really a trailer. There is no title card, no narration and no montage of the rest of the film, just one scene, played out more or less in order, with early viewers’ reactions stamped over it in big red letters. That is a bold way to sell a movie, and it tells you exactly which moment the studio thinks will put people in seats.
For anyone who has not followed it, “Clayface” stars Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, a Gotham actor whose face is mutilated by a local crime boss and who turns to an experimental treatment that gives him his looks back and then starts to take them away again. James Watkins (“Speak No Evil”) directs from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, with the story credited to Flanagan, and the film opens only in theaters in North America on Friday, October 23rd, with the international rollout starting October 21st. ComicBook.com, which ran the same footage on October 16th, called it the full airplane scene and dared readers not to look away. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Clayface” airplane scene and everything shown in the new video.
That is a bold way to sell a movie, and it tells you exactly which moment the studio thinks will put people in seats.”
It opens on a lavatory door sign flipping from VACANT to OCCUPIED, and the lit symbol above it switching from green to red. Inside, a hand sets a black bag down by the sink before Matt slides off a pair of sunglasses and stares into the mirror, and something around his eye is already wrong. A flight attendant knocks on the door from the galley side while two colleagues work behind her, and the video keeps cutting back out to the cabin, first to a wide shot of rows of blue-lit seats, later to the same aisle washed in red and orange as an attendant walks it. Those cutaways are doing a lot of quiet work. Every time we leave the bathroom, the plane looks normal, and every time we come back, it is worse.
What is worse is mostly Matt’s own hands. He presses his fingertips under one eye, pulls at the skin, digs a knuckle in, then pinches the bridge of his nose as if he can hold his face in place by force. At one point he bares his teeth in something close to a grin while his fingers are still dragging at the lid, which is the single most unsettling frame in the whole video. Harries plays it as panic first and something uglier second. By the 40-second mark the skin over the eye looks puckered and sealed, and the grin is gone.
Then he breaks. He cries openly, head bowed under a “Please no smoking in lavatory” sign, and the camera drops to his hands rummaging through that black bag. They come back holding a small pair of scissors, held close enough to the lens that you can see the ring on his finger. Out in the cabin, the red light has spread, and the passengers caught in it, including two women chatting a few rows back, seem to have no idea what is happening a few feet away. It is a nasty little contrast, and Watkins seems to enjoy it.
The last 40 seconds are the reason the video exists. Matt lifts the scissors to the corner of his eye and works the tips in while he weeps. The shot switches to a tighter angle past a blur of his own hair, close and slightly out of focus, so you see the blades moving more than you see the cut. Then the edit goes to an extreme close-up, and there is no hiding anymore: a slit of eye showing through a layer of skin that has grown across it, and the scissors snipping it wider. Bloody Disgusting described the clip as showing “the devastating impact of the experiment and its nasty side effects,” which is putting it gently.
Even then, the video keeps cutting away. A passenger presses something white and papery to her face as an attendant and a male crew member stand in the galley behind her, and it is never clear whether she is reacting to Matt or simply airsick. Back in the bathroom the scissors keep working, and the video ends on Matt mid-cut before the screen goes black. There is no payoff, no transformation and no clay. The studio is showing the most human version of the horror and saving the monster for the theater.
Over all of this, the red quotes keep coming: “Clayface holds nothing back,” “Clayface is freakishly awesome,” “I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen for a second,” and “You owe it to yourself to see it in a theater filled with other people’s reactions.” Most are credited to social media handles in small type, and one of them, “There are some crazy unique horror moments that will make you squirm,” carries the handle of ComicBook.com’s Chris Killian. Putting first reactions over a scene this graphic is probably a smart move. It turns the ad into a dare, and it makes “I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen” land as a joke about a man cutting his own eye open.
The best news for horror fans is that very little of it appears to be digital. Speaking at a promotional event, Watkins said, “The scene on the airplane where his eye goes funny and he has to go in and do a little bit of self-surgery, well that is all practical.” According to reports from Hungama Express and Minute Mirror, he explained that the crew put one camera behind the mirror and another to the side, and prepared four pairs of scissors for Harries: real ones, blunted ones, rubber ones and a pair with no tip. By Watkins’s account, they barely got to the last three, because Harries started in with the real scissors. That would explain why the close-ups in this video look the way they do.
“Clayface” opens on October 23rd. It is the first full horror swing from James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios, it is rated R, and judging by this video, it is going to earn that R. Whether audiences who came for Batman’s rogues’ gallery are ready for a body-horror movie that plays like David Cronenberg on a red-eye is the real question, and the studio has decided the fastest way to answer it is to show you the worst minute and a half up front.
What Do You Think? Did the airplane scene make you want to see “Clayface” in a theater, or did it make you want to wait for the safety of your couch? Is putting fan reactions over a scene this graphic a clever dare or a little too much? And with no clay in sight yet, how much of Matt Hagen’s transformation do you think the studio is still hiding?
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