This spring, the godfather of Gen X returned with his first novel in over 10 years. The Shards is a fictionalised memoir that follows a teenage Bret Easton Ellis as he and his Hollywood friends cruise around 80s Los Angeles while a serial killer stalks the city.
To celebrate the controversial author’s comeback, we took the opportunity to revisit the many film adaptations of Ellis’ work. From the cold John Hughes vibes of Less than Zero, to the meme-ified American Psycho (and its what-the-fuck sequel), to the pitch-perfect Rules of Attraction, these are our thoughts on Ellis’ extensive presence in cinema.
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‘Less Than Zero’ (1987), dir. Marek Kanievska
This movie plays out like American Psycho: The Teen Years. The melancholic and apathetic protagonist Clay (Andrew McCarthy) comes home to Beverly Hills for Christmas to discover that his former girlfriend and model, Blair (Jami Gertz), has begun using coke – an addiction that pales in comparison to the drug dependency of her new boyfriend and serial party-boy, Julian (Robert Downey Jr). Add James Spader into that mix, playing drug dealer Rip in what’s arguably his sleaziest ever performance.
Yes, lots of the shocking content from the book has been excised for the screen (there are no snuff movies or 12-year-old sex slaves). But its sinister, detached perspective remains. What’s left is a beautiful and cold eighties time-capsule full of empty Beverly Hills glamour, drugs, parties in mansions, swimming-pools glowing at night and Rodeo Drive power-dressing.
‘American Psycho’ (2000), dir. Mary Harron
Mary Harron’s wry adaptation of Ellis’ satire of 80s, New York yuppie-ism has been pushed so firmly through the looking glass of online meme culture that it’s easy to forget what a bracingly funny, smart work the film is. Christian Bale was never better than in his Tom Cruise-inspired interpretation of Patrick Bateman. He’s an unsteady mask of manicured physical perfection: ripped, impossibly angular and power-dressed to the max. All this barely obscures a black hole of festering desperation and murderous intent. Though frequently (and hilariously) misinterpreted by disciples of the manosphere, Harron’s film is a potent satire on the destructive impulses of capitalism.
‘The Canyons’ (2013), dir. Paul Schrader
The creative partnership of Ellis and director Paul Schrader was the subject of ample media fervour even before audiences had a chance to see its product. Funded in part via Kickstarter and using the gambit of casting tabloid favourite Lindsay Lohan alongside real-life porn stars to generate publicity, The Canyons is perhaps not what people were expecting. Relatively light on sex – and very much light on eroticism – The Canyons is an aggressively ugly work that explores the decline of cinema with an appropriately off-putting digital effect. Coarse, bizarre and unforgettable, The Canyons is more than just a curiosity.
‘American Psycho 2’ (2002), dir. Morgan J. Freeman
Set nearly 15 years after the events of the original, American Psycho 2 (also known as American Psycho II: All American Girl) follows Patrick Bateman’s only surviving victim (Mila Kunis),who’s now a teaching assistant beginning to develop her own – unstoppable – murderous obsessions.
Originally entitled The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die, the film’s original screenplay had no association with American Psycho at all. However, after production began the script was altered to connect it with the original.
The film starts with a 12-year-old girl whose babysitter is on a date with Patrick Bateman. After Bateman kills and starts to dissect her babysitter, said 12-year-old girl stabs him with an ice pick… And that’s pretty much where the Ellis-verse ends.
American Psycho 2 was released direct-to-video in 2002 and holds a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was denounced by Bret himself and even Kunis later expressed her regret about the film.
‘Rules of Attraction’ (2002), dir. by Roger Avary
Long before HBO’s Euphoria, there was Roger Avary’s dazzling adaptation of The Rules of Attraction, Ellis’s 1987 novel based around his time at Bennington, a liberal arts college in Vermont. It centres around Patrick Bateman’s younger brother, Sean Bateman, as he becomes entangled in a curiously surreal love triangle.
Avary nails everything about Ellis’ work – the stream of consciousness narration, the cynicism, the nihilism, the comedy, the surreal – with breathtaking originality and style. From the often imitated split screen sequence to the hugely controversal suicide scene, there are so many moments of brilliance in the film. The most jaw dropping distillation of Ellis’ work is, however, Victor Ward’s trip around Europe, which Avery shot himself with a handheld camera.
‘Glitterati’ (2004), dir. by Roger Avary
Glitterati tops the list when it comes to the films I’m most desperate to see. Also directed by Avary, Glitterati was assembled from the 70 hours of video footage shot for the European trip sequence in The Rules of Attraction. Originally intended to bridge the gap between Rules of Attraction and the film adaptation of Ellis’s 1998 novel Glamorama, Glitterati was filmed over two weeks with Kip Pardue staying in character as the film’s lead the entire time.
Sadly, the only way to see Glitterati is on Avary’s laptop; Ellis himself has only seen it once and said it will never see the light of day as it’s “basically about 90 minutes of [Pardue] actually in character seducing women throughout Europe”.
‘Smiley Face Killers’ (2020), dir. by Tim Hunter
The Bret Easton Ellis-penned Smiley Face Killers is based around the Smiley face murder theory. The theory alleges that the 45 young men found dead in bodies of water across America between the late 1990s and 2010s did not accidentally drown, as was previously concluded, but were victims of a serial killer (or killers). The term “smiley face” became connected to the alleged murders when the police discovered smiley face graffiti at the location of at least a dozen of the “dumped” bodies.
When Jake Graham (Ronen Rubenstein) can’t shake the feeling that he’s being stalked by a hooded figure (Crispin Glover) driving an unmarked van, he fears he may become the next victim in the smiley face killers’ horrific spree. It’s a thrilling ride, mainly due to Ellis’s script, which is unpredictable and shocking. Full of his trademark eerie imagery, vague disillusioned protagonists and nihilistic imagining of the murders, Smiley Face Killers is still one of the wildest and most disturbing film experiences of 2020.
‘This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis’ (1999), dir. Gerald Fox
Back in 1999, shortly after the release of Ellis’ magnum opus Glamorama and Harron’s adaptation of American Psycho, This Is Not an Exit was made as part of The South Bank Show documentary series. It interweaves interviews with Ellis’ friends and contemporaries – novelists Jay McInerney and Will Self as well as poet Blake Morrison – with fictional dramatisations of his novels and short stories.
While some of these dramatisations are a little corny, you do get to see a young Rachel Weisz try her hand at playing Lauren from Rules of Attraction (pre-Avary’s feature length adaptation in 2002). It’s also something of a time capsule for late 90s LA, with scenes of Ellis wandering around now lost record and book stores as well as him and Sex and the City author Candice Bushnell hopping into a limo and heading to a party in the final scene.
‘The Deleted’ (TV series, 2016), dir. Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis wrote this web series – his directorial debut – which follows a group of former cult members who become increasingly paranoid when three seemingly unconnected people go missing in LA. With most of Ellis’ work taking place in fictionalised worlds of the 80s and 90s, The Deleted is definitely his most millennial (and maybe even Gen Alpha) offering. Not only are the episodes just 12 minutes long, but they’re filled with faces that are instantly recognisable to the cohort of kids who grew up with omnipresent tech. Vine stars like Nash Grier and Amanda Cerny spend their days doing drugs and having sex in what is essentially the short form, more cult-y answer to The Canyons.
‘The Curse of Downers Grove’ (2015), dir. Derick Martini
This 2015 film, written by Ellis, is adapted from Michael Hornburg’s 1999 coming of age novel Downers Grove. The film follows Chrissie (Bella Heathcote) as a teenage girl who suspects that she may be the next victim of her suburban town’s disturbing curse: whereby every year in the days leading up to graduation, one high school senior dies.
Ellis’ adaptation is loosely based on Hornburg’s novel. This means that what The Curse of Downers Grove may lack in the bildungsroman quality of the original work, it makes up for in characteristic Ellis-isms: teen angst and general cruelty. Mix this with elements of the horror genre – as well as a meth-addled punk falling to his death from a water tower in the film’s opening moments – and you’ve got some stylised fun.
‘The Arrangement’ (2019), dir. Bret Easton Ellis
In this short film commissioned by Saint Laurent, Ellis celebrates the fashion houses’ values of self-expression and confidence in his characteristically nihilistic way: by telling the story of two jealous young men who must compete for the attention of a young woman who likes them both. With its soundtrack of a Petula Clark cover of “The Windmills of your Mind”, The Arrangement is like a succinct Shakespeare work. And with all the shots of beautiful bodies swimming in sun-dappled pools and skulking around severe LA architecture, the whole thing feels like it could be a deleted scene from a modernised Less than Zero.
