DC Studios has hired Volker Bertelmann to compose the score for Clayface, putting the Oscar winner behind the music for a film that is now moving deeper into production. Bertelmann, who won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2023 for All Quiet on the Western Front, brings a high-profile sound to a project that is meant to be DCU’s first true horror-thriller.
That new credit is also why some readers are looking at the dune movie connection now. Bertelmann already has a link to the franchise through Dune: Prophecy, the HBO television series, and his name has become familiar to audiences who have followed his work beyond the awards circuit. Now he is moving from that universe into a very different corner of the DC catalog, one built around Batman villain Clayface.
Clayface is directed by James Watkins from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, with the story originating from Flanagan’s pitch to DC Studios co-chief James Gunn after the early days of the rebooted universe. Studio materials describe the film as the collapse of one man’s rise from Hollywood actor into a monster driven by vengeance. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, and the cast also includes Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella and Eddie Marsan.
That is where Bertelmann’s hiring matters most. Clayface is being positioned as a horror-thriller, but it is still a DC Studios film built around a Batman villain, which leaves the score with a delicate job: it has to push the fear without losing the franchise identity. Bertelmann is no stranger to unusual texture, having also recorded experimental piano music under the name Hauschka, but the film has not said how far his style will shape Clayface’s darker turn.
The next marker is fixed. Clayface is scheduled to open in cinemas on October 23, and the score now has the kind of marquee name that suggests DC Studios is treating the project as more than a side experiment. The remaining question is not whether the film has enough talent around it, but how that talent will be used when a Batman villain is asked to carry a horror story on the big screen.
