At Comic-Con this past weekend, there was an unexpected abundance of horror genre news, from Adam Wingard and co. revealing that Onslaught is a surprise sequel to The Guest, to Ryan Gosling and Shawn Levy taking the Hall H stage to announce an upcoming Ghost Rider film set within the MCU. And while it received a bit less attention and wasn’t quite as showy as some of the other projects that were in attendance, DC Studios’ upcoming body horror film, Clayface, also had its fair share of material to whet audiences’ appetites for its impending release.
One of the greatest little tidbits shared about the film by its director, James Watkins, in the press interviews surrounding Clayface’s panel was which classic horror filmmakers deeply inspired the film: Sam Raimi and Brian De Palma.
As Watkins told Empire Magazine when asked about genre touchstones utilized during the production, “There were definitely some Sam Raimi influences in the film… Sam Raimi sequences, as it were. I would say the other person for me that’s probably the most massive inspiration is Brian De Palma.”
For the sake of context, Clayface is the upcoming third feature film in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new DCU (I guess fourth if we’re counting Blue Beetle… or fifth if we’re pretending The Flash was kind of part of it as well, as Gunn initially hinted at when he called it “one of the best comic book movies” he’d ever seen? I digress.) Whereas prior feature films were things like Gunn’s own Superman or Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl from earlier this year, Clayface is taking a decidedly different approach. Rather than a big-budget blockbuster extravaganza focusing on a mainline superhero, Clayface is a mid-budget horror film centered around a lower-tier Batman villain.
While this may have seemed a strange choice to many at the time of announcement, the fact that horror as a genre has only further exploded in popularity in the interim between then and now goes a long way toward validating this off-kilter creative choice. And now, Watkins is further backing up Clayface’s horror bona fides by citing some truly innovative filmmakers as reference points.
It certainly isn’t surprising to see Sam Raimi’s name thrown around as inspiration, given that the filmmaker was a pioneer in blending horror techniques into mainstream superhero fare, with films like Darkman and his Spider-Man trilogy. However, it seems that Watkins is hinting at something even more terrifying, grounded specifically in Raimi’s horror roots, with works like The Evil Dead. But Brian De Palma? That’s an even more off-kilter choice that gets the mind racing.
De Palma was the king of voyeuristic suspense-driven horror movies that were deeply indebted to the Italian Giallo films of the era, as they were to Hitchcock. While the filmmaker made his own share of movies starring individuals with supernatural abilities (such as Carrie or The Fury), the far more interesting reference points to consider here are later works like Blow Out or Body Double, both of which Clayface bears some aesthetic similarities to.
All in all, this is exceedingly promising news, and I genuinely hope it rings true when the film actually releases. I would love for Clayface to be an out-of-nowhere genre smash, and with influences from Raimi and De Palma, it sounds like Watkins and co. might be heading in the right direction.
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