James Gunn’s DC Universe just introduced its ugliest new face on purpose, and it might be the best thing DC Studios has put out all summer.
The first full trailer for “Clayface” dropped this week, shared directly by producer Matt Reeves and DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn with a tagline that tells you everything about the tone: “Meet the new face of Gotham.” After April’s brief teaser, this is the real introduction — nearly two and a half minutes of footage that plays less like a superhero-movie sizzle reel and more like a horror trailer that happens to be set in Gotham. So the BR team did what we always do when DC hands us this much footage: we walked through it beat by beat.
James Gunn’s DC Universe just introduced its ugliest new face on purpose, and it might be the best thing DC Studios has put out all summer.”
The trailer opens on the before picture. Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is introduced at the top of his world — the official synopsis calls it a “meteoric rise from Gotham street kid to Hollywood leading man,” and the early footage sells exactly that: a rising actor with a face the camera loves, working a Gotham that finally looks lived-in under Gunn’s DCU banner. Then comes the fall, and it is brutal even by this genre’s standards. Hagen sleeps with the girlfriend of a local crime boss, and the boss answers by having his face carved up — the attack that ends his career in a single night. This is not the comics’ fumbled-chemicals accident; the new film plays the disfigurement as a straight revenge maiming, and the trailer does not flinch from the aftermath.
From there the footage pivots into its Faustian bargain. Desperate to get his face — and his career — back, Hagen connects with Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a scientist running a nanotech company that is barely staying afloat, which is precisely the kind of researcher willing to inject an experimental serum into a desperate actor. The treatment works. His face comes back. And then the trailer starts cashing the body-horror checks: skin that ripples when it should not, features that slide a half-inch out of place, a man watching his own reflection stop cooperating. One of the stills making the rounds shows Hagen staring into a tank in Corr’s neon-lit lab while his reflected face droops down the glass like wet clay — the movie’s whole thesis in one frame. The synopsis is upfront that the fix costs him “his grip on reality,” and the footage backs that up: the further the trailer runs, the harder it gets to tell whether we are watching transformation or breakdown.
There is also a love triangle buried in the mayhem, and it is pure Gotham noir. Corr is engaged to John Pearlman (Max Minghella), a Gotham PD detective, and the trailer positions the three of them — the scientist, the cop, and the melting movie star — on a collision course. David Dencik and Eddie Marsan fill out the supporting cast, and while DC Studios is keeping their roles quiet, that is a stacked bench for what is essentially a mid-budget horror picture wearing a Batman logo. Warning: the back half of the trailer is where the genuinely disturbing material lives, so consider this your last easy exit.
The trailer’s centerpiece — the beat everyone is going to be talking about in October — happens on an airplane. Mid-flight, Hagen’s eyelids begin melting over his eyes like softening clay. He panics, locks himself in the bathroom, and finds a pair of sewing scissors. The trailer cuts away before the worst of it, but director James Watkins has confirmed the scene goes exactly where you fear it goes, telling EW the shot was built practically: the bathroom set rode “on a gimbal so it would shake,” with layered makeup and “variations of scissors because those scissors are getting incredibly near his eye. We had real scissors, we had rubber scissors.” Harries adds that the sequence was shot as “a cutaway on a sound stage,” and Watkins says crew members physically looked away during takes — “There’s a thing with people’s eyes, which I think we all have.” Then he twists the knife: “And then on top of it, there’s turbulence. So I think that’s triggering for most people in an audience.” A director this cheerfully aware of exactly which nerve he is stepping on is a good sign for the movie and a bad sign for your popcorn.
The worldbuilding beats are quieter but they are there. Outlets combing the footage flagged a neon sign for Club Vesuvius, a deep-cut Gotham nightspot pulled straight from the Batman mythos, planted in the background of the new DCU Gotham — the first real street-level look at the city Gunn’s universe has been promising since “Superman.” What the trailer deliberately does not show is the money shot: the closing seconds tease Hagen’s final form in silhouette and shadow, but the full comic-accurate Clayface — the mountain of moving mud fans have been waiting to see in live action for eighty years — is being held back for theaters. That is the right call, and honestly, a confident one. The film also is not pretending to be for everyone: this is DC Studios’ first R-rated body-horror movie, and every frame of this trailer is comfortable with that.
The names behind the camera explain the confidence. Watkins built his career on unsettling audiences with “The Woman in Black” and last year’s “Speak No Evil” remake. The script comes from Mike Flanagan — horror’s reigning king of slow-burn dread (“Doctor Sleep,” “Midnight Mass”) — alongside Hossein Amini, with Flanagan also holding the story credit. Rob Hardy (“Ex Machina,” “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”) shoots it, Volker Bertelmann (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) scores it, and Reeves and Lynn Harris produce with Gunn and Peter Safran. Put those names on one call sheet and a shapeshifting-actor horror movie stops sounding like a gimmick and starts sounding like exactly the movie DC needed to make.
“Clayface” hits theaters October 23, a date that puts it right in the Halloween pocket where it belongs, and far enough from “The Batman Part II” — now parked in February 2028 — that the two will never fight for the same audience. For a long stretch, this is the only new piece of the Batman corner of Gunn’s DCU anyone is actually going to get, and it is arriving as the strangest version of itself: a tragedy about a man who wanted his face back and lost everything else. Body horror is a hard sell to an audience that showed up for capes, but it is also exactly the swing DC could not have taken five years ago, when every non-Batman project got flattened into the same glossy house style.
If “Clayface” works, it proves Gunn’s promise of DC being a universe of genres, not just a universe of capes, was never marketing talk. If it does not, at least nobody can say the trailer hid what this movie is. It told us, one melting eyelid at a time.
What Do You Think? Is the airplane scissors scene the moment that sells you on DC going full body horror, or the moment you decided this one is not for you? Was holding the full Clayface reveal out of the trailer the confident move we think it is, or does October 23 need a bigger hook than a silhouette? And with Club Vesuvius glowing in the background of the new Gotham, what else do you think Gunn’s DCU is quietly seeding into this movie?
See you on the next binge!
