Clayface introduces the DCU's take on Matt Hagen, an amalgamation of that character and Basil Karlo. In the comics, Hagen was a treasure-hunting adventurer who accidentally stumbled upon a mysterious, radioactive pool of protoplasm that granted him shapeshifting superpowers.
Karlo, meanwhile, was a disgruntled B-movie horror actor who initially disguised himself to kill his castmates. It wasn't until decades later that he gained those classic Clayface powers, and for the most part, the DCU's Matt actually has more in common with Basil than the comic book Matt.
Ultimately, a name is just a name, and the DC Universe has a long history of multiple characters holding the same mantle. In an interview with Variety, Clayface director James Watkins revealed how he came to use the Matt Hagen version of the Batman baddie.
"It was really landed by Mike Flanagan and the script. I read all of them, Basil Karlo and all, afterward because there are bits and bobs that are kind of cherry-picked from all over the place," the filmmaker said. "But the key journey, and that’s what Mike had chosen, was the Matt Hagen version. If you’d have gone with Basil Karlo, it’s a little bit too gothic or too hard to do in such a modern idiom."
"The Matt Hagen is a more relatable version. Whether it’s Basil Karlo and Boris Karloff, there are all those characters that it’s referring back to in the Golden Age of Hollywood, that sort of thing," Watkins added. "This is something that can sit in our contemporary time. Our Gotham is not entirely contemporary. It slightly steals from a few different genres. We wanted it to be slightly timeless, but it can play as contemporary."
After a lower-than-expected opening weekend, all eyes are on how Clayface performs over Halloween and in the coming weeks. While the movie becoming an Obsession-sized hit would surely open the door to a sequel, James Gunn has stated that he wants the movie to stand by itself and those comments were echoed by Watkins.
"That’s a question for James Gunn. I liked the standalone nature of it," the director mused. "I liked how it felt like it introduced a character. But I wasn’t trying to introduce the character to go, 'OK, what next?' I was trying to introduce the character as a full meal in itself."
Clayface doesn't feature any nods to Batman or the wider DCU, so it is very much a self-contained story about Matt's monstrous transformation. Still, it was up to Watkins to introduce Gotham City, and he had a very specific take in mind:
"We deliberately wanted it to be a bit muddy. James Price, our brilliant production designer, and I talked a lot about creating the sense of the world, and we wanted it to feel like a character in the movie. We wanted this oppressive world where the buildings really dominate. We looked at a lot of 1930s German expressionist cinema with huge dominant buildings and the odd angles and the noir-ish shadows. We also looked at street photography from New York from the ’70s, the ’80s and the ’90s."
"It was all before New York had been cleaned up. The lighting is different. It’s a lot of neon. There’s a lot of practical lighting. There’s a lot of dirt and eccentricity on the street. We wanted to definitely frame Gotham as a contrast to Coast City, with the colors, the bright sunshine, the sky, the sea. You see verdant greens and textures and stuff like that, which you don’t really see in Gotham. You barely see the sky, and it’s a very heavy atmosphere."
Clayface is now playing in theaters.