‘American Psycho’ Writer Bret Easton Ellis on the Problem With Modern Studio Horror Movies, and Why There’s Hope for Subversive Films

William Earl
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Spoiler alert: This article discusses plot points from “Barbarian.”

Bret Easton Ellis’ work often dips into horror — he penned the iconic 1991 novel “American Psycho,” the script for the 2020 slasher film “Smiley Face Killers,” and the upcoming semi-autobiographical serial killer novel “The Shards,” due out in January. Beyond his written output — eight novels, a book of essays and many scripts both produced and yet-to-be-made — Ellis is also a bold cultural commentator who loves speaking about pop culture, frequently including horror movies, on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast.”

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As scary movie fans continue to check out this year’s offerings, Variety spoke to Ellis about his horror film history, what frightens him the most and what the future of the genre could look like.

Ellis believes the new generation of studio horror films often make one key mistake.

“Especially in the ‘70s, horror movies did not have backstories or answers to them explaining the horror,” he said. “Why is Regan possessed by a devil in ‘The Exorcist?’ We don’t know. Why does the shark cruise Amity [in ‘Jaws’]? You don’t know. Where did Carrie White get her powers? I don’t know. You could go on and on with the mystery of these movies, and what made them so much more frightening was that they weren’t explained. I often find now when a horror movie goes way too far into backstory, in terms of explaining why these people do what they do, or why this monster does what it does, it really minimizes the horror.

“I think ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ is a great example. We just do not know what that family is. We get hints of what’s happened to them, but we do not get an explanation at all as to what created Leatherface. For some reason, I find that particularly scary in ways that aren’t present in other movies in the ‘Chainsaw’ franchise. The sequels explicitly detailed why things happened, and the backstories are usually just completely bonkers.”

Ellis underlined his point by analyzing the highs and lows of one of the year’s buzziest horror movies, “Barbarian.”

“I like the movie,” he said. “I thought it had a great, slow buildup that had that epic shock in the middle of it, and then it becomes this totally different movie. We’re very intrigued on how these two movies are going to merge and inform us as to why this thing has happened. I had a friend who liked it too, but also thought that in its third act it over-explains. It wasn’t scary for him anymore, and there was something about that thing, The Mother. It was more terrifying to just think that this thing is living there and goes out hunting at night.”

Additionally, Ellis and his colleague agreed that the ending pulled punches In a uniquely contemporary way.

“This friend, a filmmaker, told me that was when the movie also went off the rails for him, as it didn’t really have the courage of its convictions, meaning that the Justin Long character had to be punished somehow and that the girl had to live,” he said. “I was hoping for a slightly more pessimistic ending, because it seemed that ‘Barbarian’ was heading in that way. It seemed like a kind of throwback to ‘70s horror, and I loved the outlandishness of the monster. It was not afraid to look completely silly or dumb, and that was scary and I liked that it wasn’t CGI. It was a very scary, real, tactile, analog thing.”

Ellis noted that while studio fare can be overly sanitized in the current culture, a vibrant underground is able to keep subversive ideas alive and well.

“I like to think it’s cyclical,” Ellis said. “Yes, we’re going through this now, and we push back on that, and then we’re going to have a grittier, less ideological consciousness [in horror]. We won’t have to worry so much about certain tropes and just get back to aesthetics and scares.”

One of the current movies Ellis cited as bringing back edgy, classic horror is “Terrifier 2,” which he heard about through word of mouth.

“I was complaining about the lack of really gritty, scary horror movies,” he said. “But someone was telling me, ‘You know, Bret, if you really wanna find it, you can find the most disgusting horror movies. They’re out there. You just gotta look for them. They might not be shown in the mainstream, but believe me, you can find them.'”

Ellis continues, recalling a conversation with Miramax CEO Bill Block on his podcast.

“I go back to what Bill Block said about how there will always be a need for people to confront that darkness and to see those images, and to be either repelled or compelled by them,” Ellis said. “So I don’t know if it’s ever going to go away, it’s just whether it’s going to be in the corporate mainstream, which really doesn’t seem to want much of anything to do with anything like that except the most bland, inoffensive stuff. I’m hoping that there will be a shift, but there’s so much content out there I think you can pretty much find whatever you’re looking for.”

When reflecting on the impact horror movies had on him while growing up, Ellis saw them as a way to cope with the difficult world around him.

“Being a child of the ‘70s, horror movies preoccupied me,” he said. “I don’t know why, but there were a lot of them and I was drawn to them. I think they were a reflection of something I was going through personally, because the childhood I had was really a free-range world made up completely of adults, and there was no sugarcoating anything. There was a kind of gritty realism to everything, and you were not treated like a child. The world was still made for adults — you were basically left to your own devices, and you found out how scary the world was in various ways.

“Horror movies in the ‘70s had this allure of being a reflection of a discordant household: My parents’ marriage was flailing, my father was an alcoholic, I was realizing I was gay. A lot of issues were floating around, and horror movies acted as the most explicit way to acknowledge or relate to whatever anxiety and fear that I was going through myself. They were, in some weird way, reassuring.”

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