Movies
Horror’s Hallowed Grounds: ‘American Psycho’!
This weekend we posted the brand new edition of Sean Clark’s Horror’s Hallowed Grounds, where Sean heads to check out the filming locations of Mary Harron’s classic American Psycho! If you click here you can check out pictures from the infamous 2000 film, alongside the locations as they stand now in New York! You’ll find links to all of Clark’s previously articles by clicking here. Read on for American Psycho!
American Psycho
DiCaprio passed after pressure about possibly ruining his teen star status after the mega hit Titanic. Re-enter Mary Harron and her choice for the part of Patrick Bateman, Christian Bale.
The film was shot in 1999 for a budget of 7 million dollars. The film is supposed to take place in New York City in 1987 but was for the most part filming in downtown Toronto Canada.
Our first location is Patrick Bateman’s apartment located on the 11th floor of the fictitious American Gardens Building on West 81st Street in Manhattan.
The immaculate cold white apartment with the stainless steal kitchen was a set built in Toronto Canada. The same goes for Paul Allen’s apartment.
The locations in this film are mostly bars and restaurants, so lets start there.
When Patrick fails to score a reservation at the legendary Dorsia, (the fictitious location we actually never see in the film) he takes his doped-up date to Barcadia instead.
Barcadia is actually the Pacific Rim restaurant Monsoon located at 100 Simcoe Street in downtown Toronto. Sadly the day I visited this location there was a notice of eviction posted on the door stating it had closed down just two days before.
Later, Bateman picks up a model at a hip dance club which is actually the Phoenix Concert Theatre located at 410 Sherbourne Street in Toronto. Upstairs at the Phoenix is the balcony lounge where Bateman and friends talk to the models.
Texarkana the Mexican style restaurant where Bateman meets Paul Allen for diner is actually Montana located at 145 John Street in downtown Toronto.
The restaurant in which Patrick dumps his fiancée, played by Reese Witherspoon at the time of filming was called Shark City until it closed down in 2004. Shark City was located at 117 Eglinton Avenue East in Toronto.
Later, Mr. Bateman takes a not-quite-casual lunch with detective Donald Kimball played by Willem Dafoe. Kimball has some further questions about Bateman’s whereabouts on the night of Paul Allen’s disappearance. They dine at the French restaurant the Savoy located at 253 Victoria Street in downtown Toronto. When I visited this location it was closed for remodeling.
Bateman and the boys lounge around drinking expensive cognac having a good ol’ time until Luis Carruthers played by Matt Ross breaks up the fun by presenting them with his brand new near perfect business card. This was filmed at Le Méridien King Edward Hotel’s Consort Bar located at 37 King Street West in downtown Toronto.
There are a few scenes shot in New York besides some of the basic stock coverage you see in the film from time to time. The corner where Bateman picks up the prostitute he calls Christy was shot in New York’s Meat Packing District.
Another important iconic New York shot is one of Bateman crossing the street in front of the Twin Towers in Manhattan.
After Bateman shoots the woman for disagreeing with his trying to feed the ATM machine a kitten he is first running through the streets on New York City near the Rector Street Station located at the corner of Rector Street and Trinity Place in lower Manhattan.
He then runs around the corner and is in downtown Toronto. This is where the police shoot out took place on Pearl Street between Simcoe and Duncan just around the corner from the previously mentioned Monsoon.
Next Batman heads into to what he thinks is his office building. Once he enters he realizes that he has run into an almost identical building next door to his. This upsets him so he shoots the front desk security guard.
The buildings in reality are the Toronto-Dominion Centre located in the heart of the Central Business District of Toronto, at the southwest corner of King and Bay Streets. The area occupies an entire city block, from King to Bay to Wellington to York Streets, as well as a section to the south of King Street between Wellington and Piper Streets (between Bay and York Streets). Another unique thing about this location is that its architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe also built the nearly-identical Seagram Building in Manhattan which makes this Toronto location the perfect stand-in for New York City.
These two buildings are by far my favorite locations from the film because they rare exactly as they appear in the film both physically and geographically. Once he shoots the janitor he exits the first building and runs across the courtyard into the correct building.
Bateman heads up the elevator and to his office that we see several times in the film. The office was a set built in a studio in Toronto.
Lastly we end where the film ends, Harry’s Bar. This is where Patrick confesses to his lawyer. In reality this upper crust bar is called Biff’s located at 4 Front Street East in downtown Toronto. Sadly it was closed when I got there but as you can see from the pictures below the front door is right behind Bateman with it’s very recognizable window above it.
Well I hope you enjoyed this look inside the decadent world of Patrick Bateman. I’m off to return some videotapes. – Sean Clark
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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