Considering that the world of Batman has the richest and most recognizable rogues’ gallery in all of comic books, the various movies based on Batman (and DC Comics more broadly) have been surprisingly restrained in mining those characters for their own solo vehicles. Maybe that’s a cautious conservatism at work, dictating that Batman really ought to be at the front and center of most Batman-related projects, lest they stumble into something resembling Sony’s bizarre “Spider-Man Without Spider-Man” series that resulted in three hit Venom movies but also Morbius and Madame Web. Regardless, in the nearly 40 years since Batman first became a big-screen fixture, only a handful of his enemies have gotten their own movies, and in some ways, the new movie Clayface — just the third film in the rebooted, James Gunn-produced DCU, and the first to take place in Gotham City — is the first of its kind.

Let me explain. Of the four previous Bat-villain movies, two of them are about the Joker, only they take great storytelling pains (if not necessarily all that much creative effort) to play games about whether they exist in a world that includes Batman or will include Batman in the future — and even whether “this” Joker is the “real” Joker that we know from the comics, cartoons, and so on. The remaining two are 2004’s Catwoman and 2020’s Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), both of which focus on female antiheroes who are ultimately not portrayed as especially villainous. (On top of which, the version of Catwoman in the Halle Berry film does not live in Gotham City, nor know Batman, nor have the mask-off identity as the Catwoman from the comics, or anything else. Harley Quinn, meanwhile, is Joker-adjacent.)

Clayface, on the other hand, is very much a monster-movie origin story for a future villain who will presumably face Batman at some point. Despite its somewhat empathetic portrayal of the character, he’s not necessarily all that good to begin with; once he becomes a shapeshifting blob of liquid-skinned vengeance, he’s unequivocally on the bad side.  

Which may prompt the question: Okay, so who is Clayface, exactly? Why this guy? He’s not as well-known as Joker, Harley Quinn, Catwoman, Two-Face, the Penguin, or the Riddler, who all have pretty high rates of normie recognition thanks to multiple movie and TV appearances over the years. The Christopher Nolan Batman movies also brought Scarecrow, Bane, and Ra’s al Ghul to prominence, and more outlandish villains like Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze gained infamy from their appearance in the temporarily franchise-killing Batman & Robin.

In fact, Batman & Robin is the likely reason we haven’t seen Clayface in a movie before — that, and the exorbitant visual effects requirements. There’s a strain of Bat-villains who are more overtly fantastical and superpowered than the aforementioned core group, who are defined more by their physical differences (the Joker’s rictus grin, Two-Face’s half-scarred visage, the Penguin’s resemblance to, well, you know). Poison Ivy, on the other hand, can literally control plant life, while Mr. Freeze is kept alive by a mobile refrigeration suit. Following three massive Nolan hits and the similarly pulpy-but-grounded The Batman, the moviegoing audience arguably doesn’t much associate Batman with supernatural villains. And Clayface, in most incarnations, is a sci-fi/horror creation. He’s a shapeshifter, like a goopier version of Mystique from the X-Men.

Who is Clayface? A Brief History of DC Comics Clayfaces:

Appropriate to a shapeshifter, there have been a ridiculous number of Clayfaces in the comics. He first appeared as a non-supernatural criminal Basil Karlo (a dual homage to Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff), an actor who dons a clay mask based on one of his horror-movie characters and commits crimes.

Though he was in Batman comics as early as 1940, he only appeared occasionally before a second Clayface was introduced in 1961: Matt Hagen, a treasure-hunter who was exposed to a radioactive substance that gave him shapeshifting powers.

A third version named Preston Payne, appeared in 1978, as a scientist attempting to cure his own ailment by using the previous Clayface’s blood, turning him into a clay monster. These are the three most prominent forms of the character, but there have been other people donning the Clayface moniker, as well as the obligatory female variant: Lady Clay, whimsically known in the DC Superhero Girls cartoons as Mrs. Clayface.

Throughout DC’s many continuity reboots, animated adaptations, and other mutations of their characters, Clayface has been repeatedly reconfigured, often amalgamating the shapeshifting, the acting experience, and the mad science origins. Like Mr. Freeze, the character is probably best-known to viewers of a certain age who watched Batman: The Animated Series. In the two-part episode “Feat of Clay,” the Matt Hagen version of the character is combined with elements of Basil Karlo and Preston Payne. In the show, Hagen is an actor whose money-making face is disfigured. He is healed by a mysterious beauty cream that also grants him shape-shifting powers — but it’s supplied to him by gangsters who want him to do favors for them. Eventually, he refuses, and they force-overdose him on the substance, which turns him into the hulking, goopy, but still shiftable Clayface monster.

What is the Movie Clayface About?

The new Clayface movie follows a similar path. Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is a rising star from Gotham City who runs afoul of hometown gangsters, resulting in his disfigurement. A scientist (Naomi Ackie) has a procedure that seems to heal his face — but winds up giving him unstable shapeshifting abilities. In some ways, this old-fashioned monster-movie approach to the character feels a step or two behind the curve, given that the horror sensation The Substance covered similar ground with far more out-there grotesquerie. For that matter, various examinations of “looksmaxxing” influencers seem like they could have informed this new take on the character, rather than just having a matinee idol get roughed up by vaguely old-timey gangsters, something that doesn’t much connect with today’s world.

But this throwback approach — with few tweaks, the character could fit right into the Universal Monsters lineup — sets Clayface apart from other superhero or sympathetic-villain stories. He’s also a surprisingly decent candidate for a stand-alone story because historically, his relationship with Batman isn’t all that close. Compared to the Joker, who is positioned as Batman’s ultimate foil; Two-Face, whose original identity of Harvey Dent is usually depicted as friends with Bruce Wayne; Catwoman, sometimes seen as a potential romantic partner for Batman; or even the Penguin, whose relationship to wealth and power forms a contrast with both Bruce Wayne and Batman, Clayface is kind of off doing his own nothing, not particularly entwined with Batman or Bruce. Even among the supernatural villains, he doesn’t form the kind of pointed contrast of, say, Man-Bat, a Jekyll-and-Hyde type character who transforms into a man-sized bat.

No, Clayface got the call apparently because Gunn and his producing partner Peter Safran just plain liked the pitch from Mike Flanagan (who did not direct the movie, but receives a co-writing credit on the screenplay), possibly because that pitch was basically “do a new version of that Batman: The Animated Series episode everyone likes.” Those who haven’t seen the episode will probably just take the movie as a horror-revenge story with some kind of unmentioned Batman connection.

And hey, if this horror-supervillain hybrid hits, he doesn’t even need to go face Batman right away next time out. After all, some years ago in the comics, multiple Clayfaces got together and formed a group called The Mud Pack (I am not making this up). If that’s what it takes to break through the sameness of the modern superhero movie, by all means, let’s wade through the mud.

Clayface hits theaters on Friday, October 23, 2026.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.