MAKING TWENTY YEARS ON FROM YUPPIE SERIAL KILLER A PATRICK BATEMAN’S CINEMATIC RAMPAGE, EMPIRE DISSECTS MURDERER THE CULT-ICONIC FIEND AT THE HEART OF AMERICAN PSYCHO

MARY HARRON CALLS it “a monster movie”. The terrifying creature at American Psycho’s core, though, doesn’t have trailing tentacles, bloodshot eyes or reptilian skin. Instead of sharp teeth, it wears a sharp suit: Valentino pinstripe, perfectly pressed, designed to draw green-eyed glances from his fellow Wall Street sleazes. This monster owns a gleaming Rolex, lives in an elegant condo and smiles politely through slap-up dinners at his city’s finest restaurants. But that is just one side of Patrick Bateman. The fictional ’80s investment banker also stalks the streets of New York at night, maiming sex workers, murdering the homeless and committing unimaginable atrocities to a deplorable soundtrack of Phil Collins music.

“He really was a black hole, this chiselled chasm of nothingness,” says Harron, the acclaimed satirical thriller’s director/co-writer, speaking to Empire on the film’s 20th anniversary (she doesn’t mention having reservations at Dorsia later to celebrate). “We talked a lot about him being this alien who crash-landed on Earth, constantly looking for clues as to how to pretend to be human. Patrick reads magazines to learn how to dress. He watches porno to learn how to have sex. And he’ll watch the Texas Chain Saw Massacre

to learn how to kill.”

Adapted from the controversial novel by Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho follows Bateman on a violent, secret rampage, slaughtering between stockholder meetings and phone calls about investment portfolios. The film made a star of Christian Bale, sent tremors through the American media (“Some of whom thought the movie was too misogynist; others of whom thought we weren’t misogynist enough,” laughs co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner) and established an enduring new movie villain, one meant to symbolise “predatory capitalism”, as Harron explains. “With Bateman, we took everything insane about the culture at the time — the greed, the obsession with beauty, with status, with power — and combined it. American Psycho

created a human being out of those forces. I didn’t expect it to still resonate decades later.”

Twenty years on, in a time of toxic masculinity, with the character’s idol, Donald Trump, now wreaking havoc in the White House, Bateman remains a potent pop-cultural symbol. Building this iconic, immaculately coiffured killer, however, wasn’t easy. Return those video-tapes later; come with us instead as we explore the anatomy of a killer…