Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Feminists attacked it as a how-to manual for misogyny, murder, and mutilation. TIME published a passage about a woman being skinned, while SPY excerpted a scene describing oral sex with a severed head. American Psycho survived, of course. Knopf picked it up and issued it as a Vintage paperback original in early But a number of booksellers declined to stock it, and a preponderance of critics excoriated it.
Even so, it was enough of a success to catch the attention of producer Edward R. Pressman, who developed it as a feature project for Lionsgate, then an upstart film distributor based in Vancouver. American Psycho is not one of those novels that suggests itself as a movie. Nobody knows or cares that Patrick Bateman is a killerβeven his attempted confessions are ignored or misconstrued. How do you translate that to the screen? Despite the difficulty, there were several possible paths for American Psycho.
To some degree, time was on their side. Since the original backlash against American Psycho , films like The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en had made the flamboyant serial killer and his Grand Guignol trappings a popular trope in crime dramas.
Thanks to the necessity of clearing any mention of brands, the endless details of fashion designers and beauty regimens are gone, replaced by a more reasonable and expository voiceover. The language has been toned down to omit racial slurs, making Bateman slightly less loathsome. Submitted for your approval: a hateful, hugely insecure dork with some skeletons in his closet, a severed head in the fridge, and more money than he knows what to do with.
Much more successful is the bit later on where Bateman brings home two prostitutes, picking up one on the street and ordering the other by phone. Bale spends his time in bed up on his knees, thrusting at one of the women from behind while flexing and looking up to admire his own physique in the mirror. DP Andrzej Sekula captures a plethora of handsome, precisely-lit close-ups of Bateman that, coupled with a few wider shots displaying his mostly nude body, add tension to the film by forcing viewers into a visual intimacy with him that may be distressing.
