After 44 Years Flirting With Horror, DC's R-Rated Batman Spinoff Finally Goes All-In

DC has been borrowing from horror for decades without ever fully handing one of its major movies over to the genre. Back in 1982, Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing was basically a monster movie. Tim Burton transported Batman to a gothic world, Constantine filled Los Angeles with demons and possession, and The Suicide Squad pushed mutation and gore further than most superhero movies would dare. But horror is more than creepy imagery or a few grotesque scenes. It is about making fear, dread, and loss of control part of what actually drives a story.

DC’s main rival, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is known for a “house style” that’s comedic (even when the MCU goes R-rated). Under James Gunn, the DCU has taken a very different approach. Each filmmaker or showrunner is free to tell the story in their own way, meaning Lanterns feels nothing like Superman. What’s more, this has now given DC the perfect chance to go all-in on horror.

DC Movies Have Been Borrowing From Horror For Decades

Swamp Thing was true horror, but ever since DC has flirted with it rather than committing. Batman Returns reworked Penguin into a grotesque figure who is abandoned as a deformed baby, raised beneath Gotham, and eventually emerges from the sewers surrounded by circus freaks. Burton even drew inspiration from Lon Chaney’s London After Midnight when reshaping the character, pushing Oswald much closer to a tragic movie monster than the gentleman criminal from the comics.

Selina Kyle’s transformation into Catwoman is just as strange. Max Shreck throws her from a window after she discovers his corruption, and after surviving the fall, she is surrounded by alley cats before returning home and tearing apart her old life. Even Catwoman’s stitched costume came from Burton imagining a stuffed cat coming apart at the seams, giving her rebirth an almost Frankenstein-like quality.

selina catwoman talking to bruce wayne in batman returns

Fast-forward to Constantine, and DC moved even closer to the genre. John Constantine performs exorcisms, sees demons hiding among humans, travels to Hell, and investigates a plot involving possession and the Antichrist. The movie is openly rooted in horror, but it still moves like a supernatural detective story, with Constantine following clues and fighting his way toward the truth.

Years later, The Suicide Squad brought the ugliness back through body horror. Starro attaches smaller versions of itself to people’s faces, Project Starfish exposes human experimentation, and the movie embraces graphic mutilation. Even with all that gore, though, The Suicide Squad is still moving at the pace and tone of an action-comedy. James Gunn has promised a darker DCU, though, and that is finally about to be delivered.

Clayface Finally Makes Horror The Main Event

As the Clayface trailer makes clear, the next DCU movie is full-on body horror. Matt Hagen does not need a haunted city or supernatural villain because the thing he is losing control of is his own body. His face stops being fixed, his physical form becomes unstable, and the powers that make him dangerous also make it harder to hold onto any normal sense of himself. The horror is not happening around him. It is happening to him. For a character like Clayface, the superpower and the nightmare are basically the same thing.

That gives the movie something DC’s earlier horror-leaning films did not have to deal with for very long. Hagen cannot leave the disturbing part of the story behind after one scene. He still has to eat, sleep, talk to people, and recognize himself while his body is becoming less reliable by the day. The fear comes from having to live with the transformation, not just surviving it.

That is why Clayface feels like such a bigger step for DC. The trailers have focused heavily on Hagen’s physical deterioration, and the movie arrives just before Halloween, but the real difference is that his transformation is not just a striking visual. It influences how he moves through the world, how he sees himself, and how much control he still has over the person he used to be. Little wonder DC chose to release Clayface on October 23, just over a week before Halloween.