American Psycho (2000)

“I have to return some videotapes.” — Patrick Bateman

In the opening moments of American Psycho (2000), Director Mary Harron presents a perfect tongue-in-cheek amuse-bouche for the satirical horror to come.

The controversial adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of the same name opens with bloody drops falling in elegant slow motion in a stark white vacuum. An uncomfortable hum lingers while they fall, each red drop punctuated by a sharp trill of violins. The tone is elegant and sleek, the pacing slow and ominous. When Harron’s credit appears, the music quickens, the blood spattering over a pristine white surface. The title appears, the squat letters tracked wide across the space. The red keeps coming, now in rivulets, snaking itself across the void. A knife, raised high, gleams silver in the light — a nod to Hitchcock, of course — and hacks into a hunk of meat, turning notions of murder and violence into something ordinary — a culinary gesture. Plump raspberries bounce onto an exquisitely plated dish of late ’80s-era nouvelle cuisine. This ballet of blood and visual trickery is our entry into American Psycho, its sense of humour and its commentary: sharp and cutting, viciously playful, and all a matter of taste.

Look at that subtle off-white coloring

Designed by artist and activist Marlene McCarty, the credits are set in Copperplate Gothic, a typeface popular in the 1980s and often associated with authority, large institutions, banking and power. Staid and stacked, the credits are aligned to a grid and, like the plates of food, arranged in perfect balance. They appear either to the left, to the right, or just beneath the center horizontal line of the screen, not a hairspace out of place. A formal and crisp wedge serif, Copperplate Gothic was designed by typographer Frederic Goudy a century earlier in 1901. It has no lowercase characters, only small caps, and is often used by title designers because of its uniformity and barely-there-serifs which help maintain legibility at smaller sizes. The typeface appears in much the same manner – ominous, sterile, high class – in David Fincher's Panic Room.

The tasteful thickness of it

In likening the act of murder to food preparation – and therefore positing people as objects to be consumed – the opening establishes the film's themes of violence and possession, conspicuous consumption, and the perversion of the American dream. It also frames the serial killer as artful butcher and sets the precedent for television series like Dexter (2006) and Hannibal (2013).

Among the pale roses and fine plating, the flourishes of pastry and foie gras, the cigarettes and satin gloves, a set of slicked-back suits slap down platinum cards. One of them is the maniacal monster, “the voice of reason, the boy next door,” and dressed to kill.

A discussion with American Psycho Director MARY HARRON and Title Designer MARLENE McCARTY.



American Psycho has this exquisite title sequence that sets up the tone for the film. What was your process for creating that?

Mary: Originally, no title sequence was budgeted. So there was no title sequence planned; it wasn’t written into the script. It was only when I was editing that it seemed we needed it.

I had this image of 1980s nouvelle cuisine... a lot of raspberry coulis. The idea of drops of red sauce that look like blood. That was the initial thought – drops of…

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