Can DC blend horror with a superhero movie? ‘Clayface’ wants to blur genres

NEW YORK (AP) — The dominant movie genres of the past decade, superhero films and horror, have usually stayed, like bashful teenagers on the dance floor, on separate sides of the multiplex. But when James Gunn and Peter Safran were plotting the projects with which they wanted to launch their era of DC Studios, writer-director Mike Flanagan came in with a pitch that would fuse both genres. Neither Safran nor Gunn were looking for a standalone movie about Clayface, a lesser-known villain from the Batman comics.

But they were won over by Flanagan’s vision, which eventually became a script by Flanagan and Hossein Amini. “It fit within the broader framework of how James and I saw the broad spectrum of film and television shows we want to make,” says Safran. “But it really was Mike Flanagan’s passion and pitch.

You always look for volunteers and not recruits.” Not many studios would push “Clayface” to the front of the pack, but Gunn, who started in horror, and Safran, who helped launch “The Conjuring” franchise, made “Clayface” — with James Watkins eventually coming on to direct — part of their first wave of DCU films, following “Superman” and “Supergirl.” “Clayface” is a darker detour for DC. And, if it proves successful, it just might open up a darker frontier for comic book movies. “From the get-go, this was not designed to be a traditional superhero movie,” Safran says.

“It was always supposed to be a character-driven story that uses the DC mythology. If you took the DC elements out of it, it would just be a great horror movie.” That makes “Clayface” something unusual in the normally calculated realm of superhero movies. It’s modestly budgeted at $40 million.

And it stars the relatively unknown Tom Rhys Harries as a little-known DC villain. “A lot of people wouldn’t necessarily know who Clayface is, but they wouldn’t need to,” says Watkins, the Welsh filmmaker of “Speak No Evil” and “The Woman in Black.” “It’s its own movie.” ‘Supergirl’ disappointment puts pressure on ‘Clayface’ That, Safran says, is by design. He and Gunn have emphasized filmmaker-first projects at DC, carving a more idiosyncratic, multigenre path that has won them fans but also added some degree of risk.

“Clayface,” which opens in theaters Oct. 22, will debut shortly after Skydance and David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Ellison is keeping Gunn and Safran to lead DC, eve…