Anytime comic book cinema veers more into horror than action, my eyeballs are perked. So it’s a good thing I don’t have to worry about my amorphous skin trying to close up over my eye sockets, and can freely enjoy the visual monstrosity at the heart of James Watkins’ Clayface. The upcoming horror movie has held my rapt attention ever since Mike Flanagan was revealed as the initial screenwriter, and the first full-length trailer delivers on the heightened tension in spades.
Back when the first-look teaser was released, it brought to mind an absolute classic body-horror movie that come up nearly as much as I think it deserves to. So when CinemaBlend spoke with Clayface’s director at San Diego Comic-Con, I made sure our intrepid Jeff McCobb asked him to namecheck any potentially more obscure influences on his upcoming DCU film outside of David Cronenberg’s filmography. To my absolute glee, he responded with:
Eyes Without a Face.
Thank you, James Watkins! Eyes Without a Face is exactly the movie that I was hoping he would bring up. Georges Franju’s 1960 feature, based on Jean Redon’s 1959 novel, has indeed become one of the most revered French horror films of an era, and has influenced untold numbers of movies over the years. But it doesn’t exactly come up nearly as often as Psycho or Peeping Tom or Roger Corman’s various efforts from that and surrounding years. Maybe I’m just talking to the wrong people…
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The comparison points aren’t too wildly out there to put together. Eyes Without a Face centers on a plastic surgeon who will essentially do whatever it takes to perform a succesful face transplant for his beloved daughter after a car crash left her with a disfigured face. Clayface‘s name obviously belies just how much of his body is affected by those injections that Naomi Ackie’s character gives him. (To be fair, she thinks she’s helping….I assume.)
James Watkins may have sent me to cloud nine with that answer, but he wasn’t done talking or anything. He continued talking about influences, saying:
We looked back at all the original, the Frankensteins. I mean, the shapeshifting mythology, you can go back to Greek mythology. That sense of how you can change, or how you can turn into a monster, is sort of hardwired within our DNA and story, and that really spoke to me up front.
To that end, the classic Universal Horror movies were all about changes made to the human body, both before and after death, from Frankenstein to Dracula to The Invisible Man and The Mummy and the rest, some of our most enduring scary stories are all about body horror, even when there isn’t tons of bloody gore involved.
DC’s Jim Lee welcomed James Watkins and Clayface star Tom Rhys Harries to his SDCC panel, where the comic legend shared his own highly positive opinions after having watched the movie in its entirety. So one can only hope that means good things for the future of DC horror.
As far as Watkins’ own future with DC in any genre, that’s a topic the director doesn’t seem to have the time to sit around and think about, since Clayface still has a ways to go before its 2026 release on October 23. Here’s what he told us when we asked about what might be next:
I never talk about the future. I’m very much in the present. [Laughs.] I’ve still got stuff to do. We haven’t quite…I still gotta mix the movie. So it’s like, the movie is there, but there’s still things that we need to do to finish it.
Halloween can’t come soon enough this year, though I’m already hoping to see some branded Clayface costumes at Spirit Halloween. I need a 15-foot-long inflatable arm hammer, dangit.
While waiting for Clayface to hit theaters, Eyes Without a Face is available to stream via HBO Max subscription, and is also streaming on Tubi and Pluto. And while you’re on Tubi, you might as well also stream Antonio Banderas-starring The Skin I Live In.