San Antonio Monkey Lab Targeted in New PETA Video From ‘American Psycho’ Director Mary Harron
For Immediate Release:
May 15, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
In a new, hair-raising PETA video, horror director Mary Harron exposes other violent predators—experimenters who mutilate and kill monkeys in cruel laboratory tests—in time for the 25th anniversary of her cult classic American Psycho.
The terrifying TV spot debuts today in San Antonio, targeting the federally funded Southwest National Primate Research Center at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, and will run on Adult Swim, MTV, and TV Land through May 21.
The video shows a human strapped to a chair in a barred prison cell. A circular metal device has been screwed into the victim’s head, immobilizing it. A man in a lab coat and surgical mask enters. Pupils dilate. A needle plunges. Screams ring out as a power drill bores into the skull, and there’s a sudden cut to an image of a real monkey in a real laboratory enduring the same kind of invasive torment as monkeys in laboratories across the country.
“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.
The primate center has been repeatedly cited for federal Animal Welfare Act violations. In 2021, 159 baboons suffered from painful frostbite so severe that their fingers, toes, or tails had to be amputated because the laboratory failed to protect them during a winter storm. Primates there have also been strangled by door cables and burned by exposed pipes.
Under pressure from PETA, the primate center demoted Deepak Kaushal from his position as director in 2023 after he lied about data in an experiment that involved infecting monkeys with tuberculosis, treating them with a combination of drugs, and then infecting them with simian immunodeficiency virus.
In nature, monkeys form deep emotional bonds with their family members. Those born in laboratories are often torn from their anguished mothers, sometimes within just days of birth, and confined to barren steel cages.
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.
