Watch the trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOyhlkIMh3A
For most of cinema history, body horror has been the genre that critics adore, midnight audiences cherish and studio accountants regard the way the rest of us regard a lump in an unexpected place. That may be changing. DC Studios’ Clayface has taken around $83 million worldwide after its second weekend, which, according to the figures doing the rounds, puts it past Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (about $77 million) as the highest-grossing “pure” body-horror film ever made.
Those inverted commas around “pure” are doing some heavy lifting. They are presumably there to fence off the Alien films and the Resident Evil series, where the flesh-melding comes with spaceships or zombies attached. Inflation has also been politely left outside. David Cronenberg’s The Fly took around $60 million in 1986, which in today’s money would leave both films looking a little peaky. Still, a record is a record, and this one says something.
The total breaks down as $44.1 million in North America and $38.9 million overseas, where the UK has been the biggest single market at $6.1 million. We like to think that’s down to a nation raised on The Quatermass Xperiment having a natural appetite for a man whose body won’t stay put. The film opened on 23 October with about $24.5 million in the US and an A- CinemaScore, a grade horror audiences hand out about as often as Hammer gave Christopher Lee a happy ending. Its second domestic weekend brought in $10.4 million, tying it for top spot with You Can See Everything.
The real story is the budget. Clayface reportedly cost $44 million, which is pocket money by superhero standards and means it doesn’t need to make a billion dollars to stop executives weeping into their oat lattes. On the usual rule of thumb that a film needs about two and a half times its budget to break even, it needs around $110 million, and trackers expect a final tally somewhere between $115 million and $130 million. Set that beside Supergirl, which reportedly took $126.4 million worldwide on a budget of $170 million or more, and you can see why somebody at Warner Bros. is now quietly working out how many other Batman villains might be persuaded to dissolve.
Hideo Kojima, whose film verdicts on X carry real weight in some circles, has also given it his blessing. He admitted that he hadn’t known the character, but said he enjoyed the film, and placed it in the line of 1950s and 1960s SF he loves, about lonely men slowly turned into something monstrous by experiments and accidents: Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, the original 1958 The Fly and 4D Man. He expected the inevitable comparisons with Cronenberg’s The Fly and The Substance, but argued that this is really the story of a method actor who can become anyone, right up until he literally can. As critical framing goes, that’s sharper than much of the trade coverage.
So why is body horror suddenly paying its way? Partly because it’s cheap to do well: prosthetics, practical goo and a lead actor willing to suffer for his art cost a fraction of a CGI city being folded in half. Partly because The Substance showed there’s a mainstream audience for horror about vanity, celebrity and the tyranny of the mirror, and Hollywood is nothing if not a town of experts on those subjects. And partly, perhaps, because audiences who have watched a decade of superheroes saving the world are rather enjoying one who simply falls apart. Here at SFcrowsnest, when we covered the Clayface trailer in September, we reckoned horror fans never tire of watching a vain man pay for his vanity. The box office seems to agree.
The cheapest special effect in cinema remains a man looking into a mirror and screaming. DC appears to have worked out that it’s also one of the best.
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