Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | April 23, 2026
I’ve had eczema on a good percentage of my body for most of my life. That has changed in the last few years, thanks to a new wonder drug that I have been injecting into my thighs, but, for decades, I was constantly changing some new kind of cream that was going to clear up all of my red spots and itchy patches. My parents would give me oatmeal baths and rub aloe vera plants over my skin to no avail. So, I’d have to cover myself in lotion constantly, knowing I wouldn’t feel normal otherwise.
While I wouldn’t have expected something like that to lay a basis for fear in my mind, that would certainly be the case when I first laid my eyes on Feat of Clay, a two-part episode of Batman: The Animated Series. It told a story of the Batman villain Clayface. In this iteration (like others), the character is a struggling actor. He develops an addiction to a cream that fixes his face, and is done in when two mobsters attack him and pour the cream down his throat until it turns him into a monstrous villain. It scared the hell outta me.
Because the man seems tapped into everything that terrifies me, those episodes served as something of an inspiration for Mike Flanagan, who wrote the screenplay for the upcoming DCU movie Clayface. The script has since been rewritten by Hossein Amini, but it appears the film has retained the terrifying aspects of what Flanagan was aiming for. A new trailer just dropped, set to a slowed-down version of Do You Realize?? by the Flaming Lips, and it is pretty damn creepy.
We see the lead, played by Thomas Rhys Harris, sitting in a hospital bed, wrapped in bandages, intercut with lots of bright lights and melting faces. So, the horror is definitely there. There’s also a wild shot of the main character’s shadow forming its hand into some kind of spiked wrecking ball to hit somebody with. So, while there will be some horror, expect some big comic book swings as well. A version of Clayface has already been introduced in James Gunn’s DCU via the cartoon Creature Commandos, so he could be setting this one up to have a bigger role in things to come.
It could shape up to be an explosive year for Gunn’s DCU. We’ll see Clayface, Supergirl, and Lanterns, and all of them look fantastic and very different.
