25 Incredibly Well-Made Horror Films Directed By Women

13. Mary Harron - American Psycho (2000)

When Patrick Bateman (played brilliantly by Christian Bale) peeled back his herb-mint face mask to reveal his chainsaw-wielding proclivities as a serial killer in Mary Harron's American Psycho, America froze. It certainly was not a feminist comedy that the naysayers and boycotters had expected. "It's just as well a woman directed American Psycho," wrote Roger Ebert in his review of the film. "She's transformed a novel about blood lust into a movie about men's vanity." In the film, scenes depict Bateman physically and mentally abusing prostitutes, dismembering them with chainsaws, and hanging mangled female corpses on hangers in a closet. Which, on a purely surface level, sure looks and feels misogynistic. What so many of American Psycho's critics seem to overlook, however, is the fact that it's a satire - and an incredibly smart one, at that. And what both Bret Easton Ellis original book and Harron's film skewer is the worst kind of consumerist, superficially inclined person who fails to realise that surrounding one's self with expensive, fancy things only exacerbates one's ever-growing unhappiness. And while the film plays it quite ambiguous about whether or not Bateman is actually a murderer, it€™s still a great journey through the mind of a sociopath.