American Psycho has been recognized as a brilliant thriller of its time and can legitimately be labeled a scandalous novel. The novel was published in 1991 by the daring author Bret Easton Ellis and was later adapted into a movie production in 2000 by the director Mary Harron. The novel endured nasty criticism to the point of rousing riots and the boycott of the publishing company, Simon & Schuster; who later dropped the publication of the book, due to the negative publicity. Bret Easton Ellis’ novel was convicted of national censorship, and remains censored in select countries. The disapproval of Ellis’ novel was based on the graphic sequences of sexual violence and the explicit murderous thoughts from within the mind of the serial killer Patrick Bateman. Harron later decided to transform the rule-breaking thriller, in spite of the criticism, and capture the story with the approach of a black comedy by dismissing select gruesome details, along with shaping other aspects of Ellis’ horror. Mary Harron used a distinctly different style, tone, and symbolism in her film American Psycho than Bret Easton Ellis fashioned in his novel American Psycho.
The film director Mary Harron developed a different style from Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. The style is different in the order of events and how the events take place. Throughout the screenplay, a person who has read the novel can see that the film does not follow the structure of Ellis’ style. The film does this in ways of both combining chapters and omitting certain sections of the novel and its immoral detail.
The effects of the change in style are a different response from the audience and the overall outcome of the movie production becomes different when compared to the novel. The different response from the audience results from how the style is being created. The style is more layered in a sense that Harron combines two chapters of Ellis’ novel