Can DC blend horror with a superhero movie? 'Clayface' wants to blur genres

The dominant movie genres of the past decade, superhero films and horror, have usually stayed, like bashful teenagers on the dance floor, on separate sides of the multiplex. But when James Gunn and Peter Safran were plotting the projects with which they wanted to launch their era of DC Studios, writer-director Mike Flanagan came in with a pitch that would fuse both genres.Neither Safran nor Gunn were looking for a standalone movie about Clayface, a lesser-known villain from the Batman comics. But they were won over by Flanagan’s vision, which eventually became a script by Flanagan and Hossein Amini.“It fit within the broader framework of how James and I saw the broad spectrum of film and television shows we want to make,” says Safran. “But it really was Mike Flanagan’s passion and pitch. You always look for volunteers and not recruits.”Not many studios would push “Clayface” to the front of the pack, but Gunn, who started in horror, and Safran, who helped launch “The Conjuring” franchis