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Speculation about what Mike Flanagan's Clayface movie will look like is, unsurprisingly, running wild online (In fact, you may recall I speculated that the movie wouldn't be in James Gunn's DCU, which turned out to be very wrong). And while there's hardly any info to go off to make a serious guess - the film doesn't even have a director yet - a recent interview with Flanagan may hint that his Clayface script will be less bleak than 

And if that's the case, it's thanks largely to Flanagan's wife, horror icon Kate Siegel, and the kids they have together.

Speaking on The Sackhoff Show podcast (hosted by, of course Katee Sackhoff), Flanagan spoke about the film he and Sackhoff collaborated on, that is, 2013's Oculus. And more ot the point, he spoke about the radical change in his work that occurred after it.

"Looking at [Oculus] now," Flanagan said, "that's also from a time where a lot of the stuff that I was writing had really bleak endings. Very hopeless endings. And [Flanagan's work] pivots right after that, and everything I've done since then doesn't have that."

"Is that because of Kate?" Sackoff asked. For context, Flanagan and Siegel met on the set of Oculus.

"I think, in a lot of ways, it is," Flanagan answered, "And it's because of family."

"When Kate and I got together," the Midnight Mass creator explained, "My outlook changed a lot. And as we had kids of our own, and the kids started growing up, it started to become more important for me [to think about] someday, they're going to interrogate our work. Someday, we're going to be gone, and if they want to revisit us in an interesting way, then there's all this work that they can look at."

"I never wanted them to come revisit those things and be left on a note of hopelessness," Flanagan concluded, "So it's become incredibly important to me that, no matter how dark a story gets, there's always hope and forgiveness and everything at the end."

If you know the story of Clayface, especially the story from Batman: the Animated Series which Flanagan has cited as a major inspiration on his Clayface script, you know that there certainly is "hope and forgiveness and everything" hiding deep within the layers of mud and blood that make him up. 

And if anyone is qualified to go digging for that within him, it's Mike Flanagan.

Clayface is lurks into theaters September 11, 2026.

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." We couldn't agree more, which is why we think you should check out horror aficionado Greg Silber's list of the best horror movies of all time. Or, if you've already seen those classics, check out our list of the most underrated horror movies from the past couple years. And if you've already seen all of those, Let us tell you what to look forward to (or dread) in Popverse's list of upcoming horror movies.