‘American Psycho’ Legend Mary Harron Returns to Horror for PETA’s Chilling New Short Film

“I’ve heard them say I can’t feel anything. But I can. I feel everything,” Those are the chilling words of an “experimentation victim” in a new short directed by horror legend Mary Harron, who teamed up with PETA to expose the gruesome reality of cruel experiments on animals ahead of the 25^th anniversary of her cult classic, American Psycho.

In the hair-raising video, a human portrays a petrified monkey trapped in a dungeon-like laboratory—a real-life horror story that thousands of these sensitive, emotional animals experience every day in the U.S. The vivisection subject, strapped to a chair with metal bolts screwed into their head, desperately struggles to free themself as a shadowy experimenter conducts tests on them.

“I’ve heard them say I can’t feel anything. But I can. I feel everything,” the human says.

As the experimenter begins to drill into their skull, the human lets out a blood-curdling scream—and the video cuts to a real image of a monkey suffering in the same conditions in a laboratory.

Every Day Is a Nightmare for Monkeys and Others Suffering in Laboratories

Every year in the U.S., more than 107,000 primates are imprisoned in laboratories, where most of them are abused and killed in invasive, painful, and terrifying tests. Experimenters may cut open their skulls, inject substances into their brains, electroshock them, deprive them of food and water, infect them with diseases, and torment them in other cruel ways.

Monkeys are highly social, complex animals who, in nature, form deep emotional bonds with their mothers and other family members. Babies born in laboratories may cry out in anguish when workers forcibly tear them from their loving mothers, sometimes within just days of birth. Laboratories often confine them to barren steel cages, where many go insane from the intense psychological distress of confinement.

Millions of other animals, including mice, rats, bunnies, cats, dogs, and others, also suffer in laboratories, where experimenters may mutilate, poison, and kill them in pointless tests.

This Is Suffering—Not Science

Using animals in experiments has repeatedly failed to produce human-relevant results or treatments. Ninety percent of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to effective treatments for humans, and 95 percent of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human trials.

Still, the National Institutes of Health—supposedly the foremost medical research authority in the U.S.—squanders nearly half of its annual budget on projects involving experiments on animals. Funded by the agency, Harvard experimenter Margaret Livingstone has blinded infant monkeys by sewing their eyelids shut. In another experiment, she forced baby monkeys to wear goggles that simulate disorienting strobe lighting for 12 hours a day. After years of torment, she kills many of her victims and dissects their brains.

The National Institutes of Health bankrolls this cruelty instead of advancing research with modern, animal-free methods.

What YOU Can Do to Help End Experiments on Animals

“I’m working with PETA to call for an end to the use of monkeys and other animals in laboratories, and I hope this video shines a light on the immense pain that experimenters inflict on tens of millions of animals every year,” Harron said.

YOU can join her by supporting PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Now proposal. The groundbreaking initiative lays out the evidence of the failure of experiments on animals and offers a bold, inventive strategy transition to effective, human-relevant, cutting-edge science.

If you’re a U.S. resident, please send a polite e-mail to your members of Congress urging them to demand that the National Institutes of Health stop throwing away taxpayer money on pointless experiments on animals and instead focus on modern  research methods:

No matter where you live, please urge the director of NIH’s BRAIN Initiative to pull the plug on Harvard Medical School experimenter Margaret Livingstone’s twisted vision-manipulation experiments on baby monkeys: