It didn’t take long for Zack Snyder fans to find a reason to shoot down the teaser for the DCU’s latest film. While the rest of the world is celebrating the superhero franchise’s first horror film, Snyderverse fans are calling Clayface a plagiarised version of the 1960’s French psychological horror film, Eyes Without a Face. And while it would be easy to dismiss their claims, there are actually plenty of similarities between the two films.
Both Clayface and Eyes Without a Face share similar themes about obsession with idenitity, beauty and, of course, the terrifying cost of trying to “fix” what’s broken.
As we see in the first trailer for the film, James Watkins’ Clayface is about to turn the campy Batman rogue into something far more disturbing. In fact, it’s been sold as a body horror (similar to 2024’s The Substance, or maybe even 1986’s The Fly), and will follow a young actor whose obsession with fame and identity leads to a really grotesque transformation into a living mass of clay. It’s the tragedy of a man seeking fame but becoming a monster.
Eyes Without a Face isn’t too different, in some ways. Directed by Georges Franju, the black-and-white classic focuses on surgical horror. It follows a surgeon who abducts young women to graft their faces onto his disfigured daughter. It’s scary stuff, of course. But it’s also a story about losing one’s face (or identity) and beauty as both an ideal and a curse.
And yes, of course, many of the visuals are the same. The shot of Matt Hagen wearing a mask, the shot of him in hospital with the bandages on his face, and even the image of his face melting looks similar to some of the shots/scenes in Eyes Without a Face.
But they’re homages. It’s not plagiarism. It’s not James Watkins and Mike Flanagan stealing Georges Franju’s homework and slapping a DC tag to it.
Paying homage is very common in filmmaking. Tarantino does it. Wes Anderson does it. Heck, even Zack Snyder himself does it. How many visual references from famous paintings and artworks aren’t hidden in Snyder’s Man of Steel, Batman v Superman and Justice League?
Still, not everyone gets that.
On Facebook groups and on Instagram, James Gunn haters were quick to anger. “James Gunn is a fraud”, “Plagiarism at its finest,” and “The audacity of comparing pure crap with a real gem” are scattered all over the comments sections.
Thankfully, there are plenty of people who are also pointing out that it’s just a beautiful homage.
See, while Clayface is molded from the same clay as Eyes Without a Face, it’s being reshaped for a new audience and a new era. What some call plagiarism is really just cinema doing what it has always done—blending, reshaping and becoming something else entirely.
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