Editorials

‘American Psycho’ Still Kills Twenty Years Later [You Aughta Know]

Published

4 years ago

June 1, 2020

Hello, true believers, and welcome to You Aughta Know, a column dedicated to the decade that is now two full decades behind us. That’s right, it’s time to take a look back at one of the most overlooked decades of horror. Follow along as I do my best to chronologically explore the horror titles that made up the 2000s.

It was April 14th of the year 2000 and the nation was still actually interested in Santana thanks to the long lasting power of the smash hit smooth, so “Maria, Maria” found its way to the top of the charts. Americans were entranced with the one season wonder “Gossip” and sports video games dominated the market. In theaters, audiences were about to meet the man who would be Batman but this time in the guise of the world’s smarmiest sociopath, as Mary Harron’s American Psycho put Bret Easton Ellis on the map in a big way and a star studded cast helped take the film to a profit of nearly five times its budget.

American Psycho is an adaptation from a novel of the same name from post modern egotist Bret Easton Ellis, published nineteen years earlier. It follows Patrick Bateman, an elitist Manhattan investment banker who also happens to be a serial killer. Ellis’ original novel is a biting satire on the idea of American consumerism and superficiality and was critically acclaimed and lauded as “transgressive” while also gaining notoriety for its hyperviolence and objectification of women.

Film rights were purchased only a year after the release of the novel and Johnny Depp was attached early on. From that day forward, it went through a slew of changing hands from every level, directors and writers and leads, with a number of notable cinema folks attached. David Cronenberg and Stuart Gordon had both been tagged to direct but eventually dropped, Cronenberg specifically running into a number of differences with novelist Ellis who he had brought in to write the screen adaptation of the book. While the version we got is gangbusters, it’s a shame we didn’t get to see Cronenberg’s musical number to Barry Manilow’s “Daybreak” at the top of the World Trade Center. Body horror vet Norman Snider was brought in for a new script that also never found traction. Finally, in 1996 after a pre-sale attempt at Cannes, Mary Harron was attached to direct and write alongside screenwriter Guinevere Turner.

The road bumps didn’t end there. Even though Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon were attached early on, studio executives fought back against Christian Bale for the lead role and pushed instead for on-the-rise actors Edward Norton or Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio was approached and bargained back and forth, attempting to replace Harron with Oliver Stone, Danny Boyle or Martin Scorsese. Stone even came in at one point and rewrote the script, axing much of the satire, but DiCaprio eventually left for The Beach instead. Thank goodness for us because this falling through led to the version we got instead.

A movie that was largely polarizing at launch, American Psycho now stands the test of time as an excellent, albeit pitch black, horror comedy. Watching it back now, it has a supernova of elements that combine to create an absolute classic. At first glance, just look at that damn cast. Bale wasn’t the superstar then that he is now and this was really the first look we got at the cinematic chameleon he would become. The oozing charm that rubs every one of us the wrong way but exists peacefully and perfectly in the realm of the film, Bale is a tour de force here as Patrick Bateman. Obsessed with how society views him based on surface level aesthetics and looks, Bateman flips on a switch to the maniacal offbeat Mister Hyde version of himself that is controlled by vanity and he treats people like the same material objects he is so determined to own. Bale’s chaotic calm while delivering monologues about pop culture musical sensations (notice how he never likes the artists until they become more mainstream and easy to digest), along with a few unforgettable kills notably involving an ax and a chainsaw, cemented him as a horror icon.

While Bale is the spotlight, the film is littered with excellent performances. Willem Dafoe is pitch perfect as the detective who may or may not be on the trail of Bale’s Bateman, his wide smile and twinkling eyes a wonderful distraction to even the viewer as to what he may or may not know. Jared Leto as conceited pretty boy Paul Allen, a more vapid version of Bateman himself, with Josh Lucas and Matt Ross as the other unlikable businessmen is a wonderful consortium of white privilege and ego, while Reese Witherspoon has a flitting turnabout as the waifish cheater. Top it off with an early Chloe Sevigny appearance and a quick Justin Theroux appearance and it’s a who’s who of talented and underseen actors, further proving Harron’s deft eye for talent.

But the script and Harron’s direction are the real highlights of the film. While Ellis wrote the novel with satire in mind, with a focus on the unreliable narrator, Harron really leans into the ideas that Ellis touches on and expounds on them, furthering beyond sociopathic consumerism and taking a plunging stab at toxic masculinity as well. Harron has a knack for being able to take hyperviolet acts and paint them with a sheen of dark humor, even going as far to play often with aesthetics on this front. Stark white and incredibly organized environments that suddenly become splashed and puddled with bright red blood while pop megahits play in the background and Bateman mansplains long before the term existed. It’s an articulate balancing act and somehow Harron nails it every step along the way with aid from the script help from Turner. The constant one-upping that the men barb each other with, playing nice, while driving them all to be more and more morally corrupt in the interest of success is brilliant. These men spend every waking moment thinking about how much better they look than their colleagues, their worth based on the watch on their wrist or the woman on their arm, and the whole time it’s making them the ugliest people in the world to us, the onlookers.

American Psycho was written as a look at the American ideology of “things” and Harron, alongside Bale’s excellent performance, is able to properly still convey that idea while also tackling new ideas that permeate on a greater scale and make it a truly timeless film. It stung back in 2000 but twenty years later, this movie absolutely kills.

Ryan Larson

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Editorials

Fifteen Years Later: A Look Back at the State of Horror in 2009

Published

1 day ago

May 3, 2024

Mike Holtz

Pictured: 'Friday the 13th'

Can you believe it’s already been fifteen years since 2009? I feel older than Jason’s mother’s head. But never mind all that. We’re going to look into the past in celebratory fashion today and take a month-to-month look at what the world of horror looked like back in 2009.

The dreaded month of January kicked things off in usual January fashion with a forgettable title, The Unborn. A David S. Goyer picture that’s not very memorable but managed to be the sixth most successful horror film of 2009 domestically, raking in over $42 million at the box office.

Right behind it on the calendar was Patrick Lussier’s My Bloody Valentine 3D starring “Supernatural” actor Jensen Ackles. This slasher remake took the idea of January horror and embraced it, making a silly and gory slasher that was the world’s first R-rated film to ever use Real3D technology. Anyone looking for legitimate scares was probably pissed (the film has a 44% Rotten “Audience” rating) but genre fans had fun with it to the tune of over $51 million at the box office (on a $14 million budget).

Next up, releasing on January 30 was the sleepy PG-13 horror flick The Uninvited. For the life of me, I’ll never understand the choice to release a movie called The Uninvited two weeks after a movie called The Unborn; to be fair, most of us are unable to remember much about either of them.

The reboot of Friday the 13th was served up to us for Valentine’s Day Weekend 2009. A slasher movie that made a ton of money and had fans begging for a sequel… that never came. The Platinum Dunes reboot may not be universally beloved, but I know a fair share of fans (myself included) who thought the new Jason, Derek Mears, and team made a film that was both fun and brutal. And it was juicy enough to come in as the number three most successful domestic horror film in 2009 to the tune of over $65 million. Friday the 13th ’09 was nowhere near perfect but it was a damn fun time with some underrated Jason Voorhees moments and a sleek plan to tell Jason’s origin story quickly via flashbacks that some superhero franchises could learn from. Oh yeah, and it starred the other “Supernatural” bro, Jared Padalecki. I’m sensing a pattern here.

‘Last House on the Left’

Next up, yet another remake of a classic horror film: The Last House on the Left. Wes Craven wanted to see what his low-budget horror film would look like with a little walking around money and the results were that we, the audience, got to see a dude get his head microwaved. The critics weren’t huge fans but let’s be honest, it could have been a lot worse given the subject matter and lack of nuance in the 2000s. Last House went on to land itself in the top ten horror box office returns of the year.

March would also feature one of the many notches in Kyle Gallner’s horror belt, The Haunting in Connecticut, a movie with maybe too many generic possession genre moments to make a major dent in the status quo but enough to make it memorable. I’d take it over many of The Conjuring franchise spinoffs of today, personally. Though, they’re all very much alike.

April Horror would conjure nothing for audiences but Sam Raimi would bring the loud, scary, and funny back to the genre with Drag Me to Hell on May 29. This film that was somehow still PG-13 even with a cat murder, flying old lady eyeball, and mouth-to-mouth puke action was a blast to experience in the theater. Audiences agreed as the film ranked #7 on the horror box office of the year, cashing out at $42 million thanks to a loveable lead in Alison Lohman, the forever horror victim Justin Long, and some good old-fashioned, Evil Dead II-type fun.

‘Drag Me to Hell’

July would shock horror fans in a completely different way with adoption horror flick Orphan. The ending may have had all of us feeling super uncomfortable and shocked but the movie itself had adoption groups majorly upset at how the film depicted the dangers of adoption. So much so that the studio had to add a pro-adoption message to the film’s DVD. No matter, the performance of Isabelle Fuhrman would carry the film to a $41 million box office run and later spawn a decent prequel in 2022.

Speaking of collecting, The Collector was also released in July 2009 and was a pleasant surprise featuring a shitload of originality and some scares to boot. Yet another horror success that would make $10 million on a $3 million budget and spawn a sequel. We’re still waiting on third installment, which abruptly stopped shooting several years back under strange circumstances.

The fourth Final Destination film graced us with its predestined presence in 2009 as well with The Final Destination; the 3D one with the race car track opening. The film was (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) a financial success, raking in over $186 million (worldwide) on a $40 million budget.

Rob Zombie went Rob Zombie’ing as hard as he’s ever Rob Zombie’d with Halloween II later that month. He’d Rob Zombie so hard that we wouldn’t see Halloween on the big screen again until almost ten years later with Halloween 2018. And nothing controversial ever happened in the franchise again. *Shuts book* Stop trying to open it! NO! NOOOOOOOO!

‘Halloween II’

Another remake in Sorority Row was the first film to follow Rob Zombie’s divisive stab-a-thon with a schlocky Scream-esque slasher flick that had a good enough time and even boasted a few neat kills. Critics weren’t fans of this one but if you were? You’ll be happy to hear that writer Josh Stolberg just announced he’s working on the follow-up!

Sexy Horror September continued a week later with Jennifer’s Body and an all-new, emo kind of Kyle Gallner. Jennifer’s Body didn’t exactly crush it for the critics or the box office but has success in its own right and is considered somewhat of a cult classic thanks to some hilarious writing and leading performances from Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried. Also, shout out to Adam Brody’s band Low Shoulder. Machine Gun Kelly could never.

Part of the low box office for Jennifer’s Body could have had something to do with what came next as Paranormal Activity would rock the horror world a week later. The genius marketing of the low-budget film would feature clips of audiences on night vision cameras losing their minds. Whether it scared you to death or you found the entire concept ridiculous, you had to see it for yourself. Paranormal Activity would bring in almost $200 million worldwide on a 15 THOUSAND dollar budget. I’m no mathematician but I’m pretty sure that’s good. The horror game changer may just be the most remembered of all the 2009 films and it’s one every studio in the world wanted to replicate.

‘Paranormal Activity’

One film’s game changer is another film’s flop as Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster’s space horror Pandorum had the unfortunate scheduling of lining up against Paranormal Activity on that fateful day and in turn, being mostly forgotten.

Spooky Season 2009 kicked off with the beloved horror-comedy Zombieland in October, complete with Jesse Eisenberg’s meta-rules for surviving a zombie apocalypse, Bill Murray, and Woody Harrelson who just wanted a fuckin’ Twinkie. There’s nothing like a good horror comedy and Zombieland proved that all the way to the bank, making $74 million domestically en route to a second film that brought back the entire cast.

It’s only been twelve seconds since I said the word remake, so let’s fix that. The Stepfather remake would follow a week later and be met by an audience getting a little sick of them. Unlike some of the other spirited remakes that surrounded this era in horror (not that they ever stopped), The Stepfather felt like an uninspired retread of the understated but completely messed up 1987 Terry O’Quinn horror cult classic. It’s largely been forgotten over the years.

“Who am I here?” Oh yeah, it’s October in the 2000, there’s bound to be a Saw movie around here somewhere. Saw VI would be released on the 23rd of October and continue the story of Detective Hoffman while adjusting the rates of some shady insurance adjustors. Saw VI would also fall victim to a little bit of Paranormal Activity mania with the film being bested by the continued rollout of its predecessor. Things were looking a little bleak for the franchise at this point. Probably none of us would have imagined that fifteen years later we’d be talking about the same director (Kevin Greutert) returning for the eleventh movie in the franchise.

‘The House of the Devil’

After all these humongous box office successes, sequels, and remakes it would be three memorable indie flicks that would round out October of 2009; the ultra fucked up Willem Dafoe, Lars von Trier sex/horror flick Antichrist, followed by Ti West’s ’70s haunter The House of the Devil and rounded out with some Australian torture horror in Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones. All three movies each make their mark in their own special ways. What a way to end October.

But it was November that would bring the movie that scared me more than any other on this list: The Fourth Kind. A lot of you are assuredly rolling your eyes right now but this one messed me up on a cellular level despite it being a complete and total fake. The Fourth Kind decided to meld a traditional horror film with the stylings of The Blair Witch Project in an opening designed to make you believe it was based on a true story. An embarrassing attempt but the film itself had me afraid to sleep near windows at night after seeing those found footage abductions. It still messes with me, to be honest. WHY ARE THEIR MOUTHS STRETCHING SO MUCH?!?!

December was too busy doing Avatar and Alvin and the Chipmunks-type family affairs for any horror movies but even without it, 2009 was quite a year for horror. I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention some other memorable films that were released either straight to video, limited or overseas that year including Case 39 (that oven opening!), Exam, Daybreakers, Splice, Dead Snow, The Hills Run Red, The Descent 2, Blood Creek, Cabin Fever 2 and [REC] 2.

What were your horror favorites from 2009? Comment below and let us know!