Clayface

 Clayface is a chimerical film. It is an origin story about what we would call a supervillain, but it is also a tale of revenge. And, at the same time, it is a horror film, specifically a body horror film. 

The story follows an actor who acquires superpowers but does not become a superhero. Instead, he becomes a supervillain. In this origin story, horror fits perfectly: it is used to devastating effect as a means of exposing the destructive impact of revenge on the flesh, focusing above all on its two-way nature. 

Revenge strikes not only those who have generated and nurtured it, but also those who harbour and enact it. 

“He who takes revenge is never satisfied. Revenge is a pleasure that expires in the very act of its fulfilment; indeed, the avenger soon realises how bitter it is, and the fury that drove him turns against himself.” 

— De Ira, Lucius Annaeus Seneca 

Even before arriving in Gotham, Matt is already experiencing a world whose system is corrupt to the core: Hollywood. It is the realm of appearances, fleeting fame and faces devoid of any genuine identity. 

When Matt loses his own face, he loses his status as an actor as well, and everyone abandons him—his lawyer, his manager, and the rest. 

This is where Matt’s transformation into Clayface reveals its deeper meaning: metamorphosis is nothing more than the brutal materialisation of an inner void that was already there. Climbing the star-system ladder has always demanded the sacrifice of identity in exchange for serialised fictions. The ultimate paradox is thus fulfilled: reduced to a shapeless mass of mud, the actor finally stops performing. Stripped of every social artifice, Clayface no longer pretends: he can simply be. 

“Fire, Father, fire! […] I was free, utterly free; master of myself, no longer burdened by the past, with my life ahead of me, which I could shape as I pleased.” 

— The Late Mattia Pascal, Chapter VIII, Luigi Pirandello 

The environment par excellence, and the natural counterpart to this corruption, is of course Gotham. Perhaps this film does not portray the city in all its characteristic gloom—it lacks the livid colours and dark settings we would expect—but Gotham reveals itself instead through its inhabitants: from Matt’s best friend to the corrupt lawyer and, naturally, the Mafia boss. Everyone leads a life of abuse and illegality, trapped in a downward spiral in which the first crime becomes a one-way ticket to a world of violence. 

Matt’s true strength as a character lies precisely in his ordinariness within the system: Matt is no exception. As a rising star, he moves through an environment where evil lurks beneath the surface, tolerated and influential. But in Gotham—a kingdom of omertà, ruthlessness and organised crime—the poison has long since become redundant. The snake can roam undisturbed because there is no need to bite anyone here: everyone is already rotten to the core. Matt thus finds himself confronting a social structure that mirrors Hollywood, a system he himself has exploited and which now crushes him, stripping him of all power. One night with the wrong woman costs him dearly: he is disfigured, and his handsome face, the mask he had strategically fashioned for himself, is now useless. The world that once fed him now chews him up and spits him out, leaving him penniless and nameless, holed up in a squalid hovel infested with cockroaches. 

And this is where superpowers enter the scene, like a deus ex machina. Matt can now transform himself into anyone he wants and turn his limbs into any weapon—a club, a razor, a knife. There is nothing utopian about this film, nothing softened or sanitised. Matt, unsurprisingly, uses his newfound powers to exact revenge and kill anyone who has wronged him. And he thoroughly enjoys himself in the process: he transforms into other people, steals identities, dances, slits throats and disfigures his victims. Particularly interesting—and deeply metaphorical—is the death of the Mafia boss. When Matt injures himself and bleeds, the blood he loses returns to him as though drawn by a magnet. In a sequence that reverses the roles of aggressor and victim established in the opening, Matt inflicts the very same violence that disfigured him, both externally and internally. He cuts his own face with a blade, and the blood, streaming down the boss’s face, enters every orifice, slides down his throat and seeps behind his eye sockets, until Matt summons it back to himself, piercing the man’s face from within. 

Violence, like a pathogenic virus, has infected Matt. He has harboured and incubated it, eventually becoming revenge itself and mutating into a monster. But revenge is voracious, as we know, and consumes its victims down to the marrow. Matt is now many things, but he is certainly no longer himself. He is the carrier of an epidemic of violence, a shapeshifting monster who can be anyone except Matt Hagen. This is why his love story, too, is inevitably doomed to deteriorate. Matt can literally become anyone she wants him to be, but the self she fell in love with has been irretrievably lost. 

“I was nothing anymore; nobody knew me, nobody could ever reclaim me; and that was precisely why I could no longer live! I was nobody anymore.” 

— The Late Mattia Pascal, Chapter XV, Luigi Pirandello 

And amid this entire tale of revenge and superpowers, body horror was the missing link. Of course, we are nowhere near Cronenberg’s level, let alone that of the more recent The Substance, but the film shares with both the genre’s deepest meaning: metaphor. Every deformation and disfigurement of the body and flesh corresponds to the annihilation of the soul. Matt inhabits the world of Hollywood, experiences Gotham’s lustful, deceptive and violent underbelly; he melts, reassembles himself, loses himself in the illusion of finding himself again, loses his face and identity and steals those of others, has fun, is dismembered, dismembers others, loves and takes revenge. Systematic violence and visceral violence are a match made in hell. 

Matt, however, is a long way from being a conventional villain. He cannot be reduced to the classic nemesis, just another antagonist endowed with superpowers. He is, in every sense, a Dantean damned soul crushed by the law of contrapasso. The actor who once wore stage masks out of ambition now finds himself subjected to the ultimate punishment: his body becomes the living archive of every drop of blood he has spilled. Revenge, after all, is a self-perpetuating mechanism that never shuts down. This is why everyone Matt kills becomes incorporated into his formless substance. He can assume anyone’s appearance, but the mirror becomes his most atrocious sentence: when Matt looks at himself, he sees neither a god nor a triumphant executioner, but the fleshy prison of every revenge he has exacted and every life he has taken. 

“My body is an obstacle between me and myself.” 

— Diaries, Franz Kafka 

And so, when Matt—or whatever remains of Matt—transforms into Clayface’s true, abominable form, it comes as little surprise. It is fate fulfilling itself. The exact result of an equation whose variables are violence and superpowers. In short, we are a long way from “with great power comes great responsibility”. Here, great power simply begets great massacres.