10 Horror Movie Endings No One Understands

Was any of it real?

Anyone seeing I Shot Andy Warhol director Mary Harron's iconic horror satire American Psycho, which stars future Batman Christian Bale as the eponymous stock broker/ maybe mass murderer Patrick Bateman, will recall wondering how much of the flick's gruesome action is imaginary and how much actually happened by the film's close.

The last scene sees Bateman attempt to apologize for his crimes, only for his associates to have no clue what he's talking about. The people he claims to have killed are still alive, the evidence is nowhere to be seen... So did it even happen?

For a lot of critics, the point of Rules of Attraction author Bret Easton Ellis' grisly satire is that doesn’t really matter whether Patrick Bateman killed Paul Allen with an axe or actually is Paul Allen himself. His breakdown stems from the guilt he feels for being complicit in Wall Street’s amoral exploitation of the American people, a crime with a far bigger body count for which he will never be held accountable.

Released at the tail end of the Reaganomics era, the story illustrates the depravity and thoughtless cruelty inherent in the uber-rich stockbroker's profession itself, and the murder spree is either an external manifestation of the same vagrant-hating viciousness or just an imaginary way to channel his overwhelming guilt.