During DC Comics' Jim Lee and Friends panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2026, DC Studios surprised guests with an appearance from director James Watkins (See No Evil) to talk about his take on Clayface. The upcoming Batmanvillain solo spin-off horror movie starring Tom Rhys Harries is just one of the most anticipated releases of the current James Gunn and Peter Safran-era of DC Universe films.
The director told Deadline at SDCC 2026 the story of how he got on board with DC Studios' new heads: "They came to me. They sent me the script by Mike Flanagan, which I read and thought, 'This is really interesting.' The journey of this, the bones of this, is a monster story, a story of identity, of who we are, and how we define ourselves," he said, referring to the horror maestro behind The Haunting of Hill House and how his writing hooked him.
"This is a story of a guy who had built up this career, and then it gets smashed away, and how he tried to get it back. It’s a very relatable human thing. But also sort of mythic, almost going back to classic storytelling, this sort of shape shifter story, and Frankensteinstory of it all."
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The Batman villain has origins in DC Comics' run of Detective Comics #40, published back in 1940. He was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane as Basil Karlo, an actor who assumes the visage of a horror character he plays to do crime.
Watkins cites that the villain's introduction, the animated series episode arcs, and ongoing comic runs that centered around Clayface informed his take: "Everything, the Basil Karlo, Matt Hagen and all the variations." Mike Flanagan's Clayface script takes heavy inspiration from the character's iconic turn in Bruce Timm, Eric Radomski, and Paul Dini's exploration of the Caped Crusader's mythos in Batman: The Animated Series.
In the '90s generation of after-school shows on WB Kids, the lore expanded to make Matt Hagen more of a tragic figure in Batman's rogues' gallery. It gave the actor-gone-bad a fan-favorite origin story, with subsequent arcs around how he is changed psychologically by the freak accident that leaves him with a horrific figure composed of clay that allows him to transform into any shape.
View this post on InstagramWatkins continued, "For me, I wanted to dig into the emotion of the character in a deeper way. What I really responded to in all the previous iterations was the sadness, the melancholy, the heartbreak, and give it a tragic dimension, trying to find that journey about Hagen being rejected and trying to find his way. The duality of Clayface is really interesting, he’s antihero but not wholly a villain."
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Despite the film's emotional core, it's still a horror film that "takes people on a real roller coaster journey," the director assured, citing Cronenberg's The Fly as inspiration, promising the film will "give people a lot of ick and a lot of gore" through his star Tom Rhys Harries' performance. On why he cast the White Lines actor, Watkins revealed, "There’s something slightly Clayface about Tom’s face," and praised his ability to transform "between being this kind of urchin, orphan quality of vulnerability that sometimes you can play, but also by a shift [to] a manic smile that can become slightly unnerving and could do all of that within a register of keeping it real. He just felt like Matt Hagen."
Watch the latest trailer below which dropped right before SDCC 2026 kicked off:
Clayface will be followed by Superman follow-up Man of Tomorrow in 2027 and Matt Reeves' The Batman sequel in 2028. However, don't expect them all to be fully connected in any way, as the studio aims to tell stories that won't always be constrained by shared universes.
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