American Psycho's Spiritual Successor Arrives In Two Weeks

Published Jul 22, 2026, 6:02 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. While the 2000 cult classic American Psycho has a reboot in the works, Ryan Murphy’s upcoming Hulu series is the true spiritual successor to the early Christian Bale vehicle. Director Mary Harron’s American Psycho inhabits a unique place in pop culture. The story of Christian Bale’s suave, vapid New York investment banker Patrick Bateman, who moonlights as a secret sadistic serial killer, was adapted from author Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial bestselling novel from 1991. American Psycho toned down much of the extreme violence from the author’s novel, but maintained its sneering satirical wit and deadpan ambiguity. Although American Psycho’s ending hints at many possibilities, the movie never ultimately clarifies how much of Bateman’s atrocities happened in reality. Although Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner were hardly subtle in their condemnation of Bateman’s boorish ultra-masculinity and crass capitalist greed, the movie still managed to earn a misguided fandom among right-wing viewers online. Since American Psycho spawned so many memes and remains a huge part of the cultural conversation 25 years after its original release, it was no shock when Challengers director Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming reboot of the adaptation was announced. Reportedly set to star Austin Butler, Guadagnino’s American Psycho will follow his Sam Altman biopic Artificial in the director’s upcoming slate. However, it is producer extraordinaire/ controversy magnet Ryan Murphy’s upcoming Hulu thriller The Shards that will be American Psycho’s true spiritual successor. Hulu's Bret Easton Ellis Series The Shards Acts As American Psycho's Spiritual Successor With a YouTube upload of the trailer for The Shards gaining over 24 million views in less than one week, it is fair to say that this Murphy miniseries is highly hyped. While Murphy’s 2026 body horror satire The Beauty earned largely positive reviews, his 2025 legal drama All’s Fair was lambasted as one of the worst TV shows in history. Meanwhile, the third outing of his Netflix true-crime series Monster: The Ed Gein Story didn’t fare any better, making many “Worst of the Year” lists as 2025 wrapped up. With all of this bad press, it might seem tough to see why Murphy’s Ellis adaptation is seen as so promising by such a large audience. However, anyone familiar with the source material of The Shards will likely be able to guess why. Released in January 2023, The Shards sharply divided critics who either hailed it as a return to form for Ellis or wrote it off as a corny, misguided failure. The main character of the novel is Bret Easton Ellis himself, in a brazen metafictional move, as the author narrates a nostalgic look back on his final year of high school in 1981. Of course, since The Shards is a Bret Easton Ellis book, the narrator’s blossoming, complex relationship with the new student Robert Mallory can’t be its only storyline. A serial killer starts picking off people close to Ellis as the novel progresses, lending an air of seedy unease to this story of adolescent sexual awakening. Ryan Murphy’s The Shards Adapts Bret Easton Ellis’s Most Personal Book Like so many of Ellis’s earlier efforts, The Shards blends sexuality and violence in a way that is campy and entertaining for some readers, and lurid and exploitative for others. Numerous critics claimed that Ellis’s attempts to mix an outlandishly gruesome, Giallo-esque murder mystery with a poignant Bildungsroman were jarring, like crossing the hit horror Scream 7 with Call Me By Your Name. However, other reviewers loved The Shards precisely because of this bizarre, unpredictable tonal mélange. Ellis’s work has consistently toyed with auto fiction and self-referential meta-commentary over the years, and The Shards isn’t even his first novel to feature a fictionalized version of the writer himself as its protagonist. However, while 2005’s Lunar Park is an outright supernatural horror that even features a de-fictionalized Patrick Bateman stalking his creator at one point, The Shards is more rooted in something resembling recognizable reality. This is what makes the prospect of Murphy adapting the novel both dread-inducing and exciting in equal measure. For years, Murphy has incorporated elements of real-life history into American Horror Story with varying degrees of success, often resulting in accusations of exploitation and tastelessness. This trend reached its apotheosis with 2025’s terrible Monster: The Ed Gein Story, a grotesquely inaccurate portrait of the infamous serial killer that was met with derision by critics. The Shards Can Redeem Ryan Murphy’s Worst Series While YouTube creator Medusone’s detailed breakdown of everything wrong with Monster: The Ed Gein Story peerlessly encapsulates the shortcomings of Murphy’s laissez-faire approach to reality within the true-crime genre, The Shards offers the producer an interesting opportunity for redemption. Like Netflix’s true crime franchise Monster, which focuses on a different serial killer with each season, The Shards could be a campy period piece that liberally alters a real-life main character’s true story. However, unlike the killings in every season of Monster, the entire serial killer subplot in The Shards is pure fiction. While Ellis has stated that some elements of the novel’s narrator are based on his teenage self and others are exaggerated or invented, he maintains that the grisly slasher story is entirely an invention. This makes The Shards a great proving ground for Murphy, who can incorporate some salacious real-life gossip without actively besmirching the memory of real-life murder victims. After the back-to-back failures of Monster: The Ed Gein Story and All’s Fair, it was tough to see how Murphy could redeem his signature style. After the more mixed reaction to its first two seasons, Monster had clearly taken its inventive approach to real-life tragedies too far with its third outing. However, the complete critical failure of All’s Fair proved that Murphy didn’t have a new acclaimed scripted series on his hands, and wouldn’t be replicating the success of campy cult hits like Glee or Scream Queens anytime soon. Thus, The Shards represents a potential redemption arc for the producer, and a chance for Ellis to receive his best screen adaptation since 2000’s inimitable cult classic first arrived on screens. With The Midnight Club’s Igby Rigney leading the cast as a fictionalized take on Ellis himself, The Shards can now become both Ryan Murphy’s most compelling show in a long time and a long-awaited spiritual sequel to American Psycho. Release Date August 5, 2026 Network FX Cast Igby Rigney Bret Easton Ellis Homer Gere Robert Mallory Graham Campbell Thom Wright Hayes Warner Debbie Shaffer