“While I’m interested in horror, I’m not interested in just doing four kids going to the woods and get picked off by an ice pick murderer,” Watkins said. “I kind of want to get under the skin of something, I want to tap into anxieties that people have, and there were so many anxieties that were resonant in this film. Losing your identity, your livelihood, your means. I think there’s nothing more resonant than body horror because we all have those anxieties about our bodies betraying us, going wrong. So it just felt like there was a rich tapestry of things to tap into. So, the script. Then I had to pitch it to the guys.”
The “guys” were DC Studios co-CEOs Peter Safran and James Gunn, who, according to Watkins, gave him carte blanche to bring the murderous, squishy Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) to life. “I’m not sure they ever gave me anything I couldn’t do,” he said. “When I pitched the project, I was very specific about what I wanted to do with it and where I wanted to take it, and they very much bought into what I said.” Watkins was announced as Clayface’s director after Mike Flanagan successfully pitched the horror project to DC. (Flanagan stepped away early in production due to other commitments, though he retains story credit for the film.) Watkins is no stranger to directing rough stuff, having made the English-language remake of Speak No Evil and the grisly 2009 terror tale Eden Lake. Unsurprisingly, the gruesome imagery Watkins conjured during his pitch gave the notoriously squeamish Gunn the ick—a surefire sign Watkins was right for the film.
“I pitched some of the elements of the body horror and showed some quite graphic imagery,” Watkins continued. “And I remember James looking away, and I thought, ‘Oh, is this a problem?’ And he was like, ‘No, I love it.'”
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