‘American Psycho’ Legend Mary Harron Returns to Horror Directing Chilling New Film—for PETA

For Immediate Release:
April 11, 2025

Contact:
Allyson Spellman 202-483-7382

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of American Psycho, director Mary Harron has teamed up with PETA to direct a new video, released today, that tells a real-life horror story—the suffering endured by millions of animals who are cut open, poisoned, mutilated, or killed in taxpayer-funded U.S. laboratories every year. In the video, a human victimtakes the place of a terrified monkey trapped in a laboratory, where they’re subjected to one gruesome test after another at the hands of a shadowy experimenter.

“I’ve heard them say I can’t feel anything. But I can. I feel everything,” the human test subject says in the video, which shows them strapped to a chair with restraints bolted to their head. As the experimenter begins to drill into their skull, the narrator lets out a blood-curdling scream—and the video cuts to real images of a terrified monkey restrained in a laboratory in a similar device, challenging viewers to see the world through the eyes of the living, feeling beings relentlessly tormented in cruel experiments.

“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 says.

In nature, monkeys form deep emotional bonds with their family members. Those born in laboratories are often forcibly torn from their anguished mothers and permanently separated from them—sometimes within just days of birth—and confined to barren steel cages, where many go insane from the intense psychological stress of confinement. The National Institutes of Health squanders nearly half its annual budget on projects involving experiments on animals—even though 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to effective treatments for humans, and 95% of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human trials.

PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Now proposal lays out the evidence of the failure of experiments on animals and offers a bold, inventive strategy to end experiments on animals and transition to effective, human-relevant, cutting-edge science.

Harron and PETA’s TV spot will air in cities across the country where massive testing facilities imprison thousands of monkeys and other animals and subject them to taxpayer-funded, painful, and deadly experiments.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.