Throughout the final trailer for the DC horror movie Clayface, dialogue and images loop and repeat, creating dissonance that only sometimes comes together into a recognizable sentence. For example, we hear scientist Dr. Caitlin Corr (Naomi Ackie) utter “Matt Hagen” over and over, until she finally completes the sentence: “Matt Hagen can change his face.” Of course, any of us watching the trailer for Clayface know that Matt Hagen can change his face, because he’s the titular Clayface: a long-established Batman villain who can not only shape-shift, but often takes the form of a giant gloop monster who pummels the Caped Crusader with his fists.
While we get glimpses of Hagen’s shape-changing abilities, and even a silhouette of him turning his fist into a big, blunt object. However, the repetition of the name “Matt Hagen,” combined with all the images of that character (played by Tom Rhys Harries) stressing out shows us that Clayface isn’t really all about superpowers. Instead, Clayface seems to be more psychological horror, just like the great Batman villain stories before it.
Batman first did battle with Clayface in 1940’s Detective Comics #40, in a story written by Bill Finger and penciled by Bob Kane. The Clayface in that story wasn’t Matt Hagen, nor did he do any type of shape-changing. Instead, he was Basil Karlo, an actor known for the grotesque characters he brings to life through special effects (think Lon Chaney). As Batman explains to Robin in a two-panel info dump, Karlo had gone mad after being replaced by a younger actor and started acting like the monsters he played.
While clunky by today’s standards, Batman’s analysis gave Karlo greater depth than the average supervillain. Where contemporaries such as Lex Luthor, the Red Skull, and Solomon Grundy did evil things because they were evil, Clayface acted out of a fractured psyche. Such was the case for most of Batman’s colorful villains, even in the more simplistic Golden Age. In fact, one of his first reoccurring antagonists was Dr. Hugo Strange, a psychologist who used his knowledge of the mind to torment his enemies.
