Patrick Bateman is handsome, wealthy, and has a successful job on Wall Street. By all appearances, he has mastered the American Dream. Yet there's another side to this all-American "boy next door," one that's obsessed with pornography and gore, and considers power tools to be ideal sex toys. This masterfully written and shocking inditement of American consumerism takes you inside the twisted mind of a madman who is taking the American Dream to a frightening new level. Ellis started writing the novel in 1986 and it took him five years to finish it. Even before the book was published it was subject to rumours and speculation. Reviewers ranged it from spectacular to crap, but the novel is among the most talked- about of our time. American Psycho is the novel that everyone has an opinion of; president of the women's organisation NOW called it 'a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women'. The American Psycho movie has been anticipated since 1991, and has been in the media spotlight over the past two years. Mary Harron approached Christian Bale in 1997 to star in AMERICAN PSYCHO. She and Guinevere Turner had just completed a screenplay. After Bale's indie film, METROLAND, was picked up by Lions Gate, he and Harron offered AMERICAN PSYCHO to Lions Gate to produce. LG in turn fired both Bale and Harron and offered the film to DiCaprio and Oliver Stone. Under various protests, DiCaprio was advised to drop the film. Additionally, his reading for Stone went very badly. DiCaprio dropped out and Lions Gate decided to run an Internet poll to look for a new lead. On the Lions Gate web poll, Christian Bale swept 92% of the votes and was soon offered the part again with Mary Harron as director. The film was shot earlier this year in Toronto and premieres next month at Sundance.

Excerpt from American Psycho: 'Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heros, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being--flesh, blood, skin, hair--but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply immitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why--I couldn't put my finger on it.'