“It cannot be bettered”: Bret Easton Ellis names “one of the most pleasurable movies ever made”
Like virtually every popular author, Bret Easton Ellis was swiftly inundated by offers from major studios to adapt his bibliography into feature films, and the results have been about as mixed as expected given the consistent inconsistency of the page-to-screen subgenre throughout its entire history.
The author used to despise 1987’s middling adaptation of Less Than Zero before eventually softening his stance, and it would be another dozen years before another one of his works was repurposed for the screen. When that day came, it arrived in the ferocious form of American Psycho, which comfortably stands tall as the best and most famous features based on his back catalogue.
The Rules of Attraction didn’t fare quite as well, despite Ellis holding it up as his personal favourite before he decided to take matters into his own hands by co-writing The Informers alongside Nicholas Jarecki. Even though he penned the short story collection that inspired the film and co-wrote the screenplay for the critical and commercial bust, he maintained of its poor quality that “I don’t think any of those reasons are my fault.”
Ellis has also crafted the original screenplay for Paul Schrader’s sexually-charged thriller The Canyons, scripted literary adaptation The Curse of Downers Grove, and penned Smiley Face Killers, so he’s very familiar with the ins and outs of how cinema works. That being said, his pick for “one of the most pleasurable movies ever made” is a strange one, if only because the film in question is a blood-drenched supernatural horror.
He did offer an explanation, though, expanding to Rotten Tomatoes on why he derives so much pleasure from Brian De Palma putting a sleek and stylish spin on the industry’s first major movie based on a Stephen King story. “There is about 45 minutes of the prom sequence that is spectacularly visual, and it cannot be bettered upon,” Ellis suggested. “But Carrie was also for me, again, that kind of auteur-driven movie that was both personal and also could reach a mass audience.”
It’s easy to see why Ellis would be such a big fan of Carrie, considering much of his own writing has been defined by troubled characters being pushed into the extremities of violence against the backdrop of an everyday society that borders on the mundane. Sissy Spacek’s Academy Award-nominated performance is driven to the brink by the trials and tribulations of her troublesome life both at home and at high school before her latent powers manifest in terrifying fashion.
An incredible movie and an all-time great of the horror genre it may be, but “pleasurable” isn’t often a term that finds itself named in conjunction with such a traumatising and disturbing tale. Ellis is in firm disagreement, clearly, and he’s not the only one.
