The Story Behind American Psycho

Sex, death & DiCaprio... the complete history.

BY Total Film Jul 22nd 2009 8:08AMFILED UNDER: Features

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It’s not a good time to be a banker. As the world teeters on the brink of financial armageddon, public anger has risen against those who got us into this mess.

“Were our big banks run by psychopaths?” asked a recent headline in Management Today, citing research that a large proportion of banking high-fliers suffer from anti-social, psychopathic personality disorders.

If Patrick Bateman was still around, he’d probably chuckle over that one.

American Psycho was born of the same shit, but different decade: back in the 1980s there was a boom, where lunch was for wimps and greed was good.

Yet success led to excess and it wasn’t long before the men in red braces met their end. In 1991, just as Time published a jokey obituary for the yuppie, Bret Easton Ellis’ novel arrived.

“When I moved to New York in the ’80s, I realised the city had been taken over by Wall Street and the yuppies,” Ellis said recently to Total Film. “I wrote it as an act of defiance to stop myself from slipping into that kind of lifestyle.”

Narrated by Wall Street investment banker Patrick Bateman, it took the deadening consumerism of the yuppies to its logical end as its anti-hero butchered prostitutes, co-workers and random strangers.

Backlash began before the book was even published. “A how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women,” was the verdict of Tammy Bruce, head of the National Organization of Women.

And, when the novel hit bookshops, it was engulfed in controversy. Sales rocketed; Ellis received death threats. This was surely one novel never destined to be a movie, right?

Next: Wrong...

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