(Credits: Lionsgate)

When it comes to its death count, American Psycho does exactly what it says on the tin. The 1999 satirical horror movie follows the descent of a psychopathic Wall Street banker into a homicidal maniac, as viewers watch him commit murder upon murder over a six-month period. However, it does this while skewering Reaganomics and the shills of corporate America just as savagely as mass murderer Bateman massacres his victims.

Still, there’s no denying that this is the go-to movie of the genre currently on Netflix, and it boasts one on-screen murder for every eight-and-a-half minutes of action. However, the difficulty with working out just how many murders take place in the story is that several of Bateman’s grisly acts take place completely off-screen or are at most implied on-screen.

For example, halfway through the film, Bateman manages to impress a model by telling her he’s involved with “murders and executions”. She assumes that it’s banking talk for overseeing business mergers and agrees to go home with him. The last audiences see of her, though, is standing outside the nightclub where the two have met. The movie then immediately cuts to Bateman playing with a lock of her hair in his office.

In one of the film’s climactic scenes, Bateman himself gives us an idea of how many people he’s killed in total. With police helicopters encircling the office building where he’s camped out, he decides to call his lawyer and confess his crimes in considerable detail. “

“I guess I killed maybe 20 people, maybe 40,” he tells him. Yet this is more than the amount we actually see evidence of on-screen.

How many of the murders do we know about?

Bateman proves himself to be a narcissist as well as a compulsive yet quite ineffective liar throughout the course of the story. Therefore, he could in fact be exaggerating the number of homicides he’s committed as a perverse form of self-aggrandisement. On the other hand, we hear him confess to specific murders that we haven’t witnessed ourselves, from “maybe five or ten” homeless people, an “NYU girl” he met in the park, and his “old girlfriend” Bethany, who he claims to have murdered using a “nail gun”. The level of detail in these confessions suggests they’re real.

In any case, the murders that viewers see for themselves on-screen are 11 people and one dog. The first murder that Patrick commits on-screen is of Al, a homeless man who stops to lecture about getting a job before plunging a knife into his stomach and stamping his pet dog to death. The famous killing of Paul Allen with an axe to the face, soundtracked by Huey Lewis and the News, is next. Then comes the bloody end of Bateman’s friend Elizabeth and the death of fleeing prostitute Christie via a remarkably well-directed chainsaw drop.

The shooting of an elderly person who intervenes as Bateman tries to force a live kitten into an ATM machine precipitates a police chase, which results in the deaths of four cops, a security guard and a janitor. By this stage, he’s done, ready to own up to his crimes and seemingly looking forward to his prospective punishment with a sense of relief.

That never comes because his lawyer doesn’t believe his confession. Just as Paul Allen and his fiancee Evelyn had ignored his previous admissions of psychopathic rage and murderous guilt, the model in the nightclub had taken his confession of murder as a corporate brag, and no one in Paul Allen’s building answered Christie’s desperate pleas for help. Even the police helicopters seem to disappear overnight as their man walks free.

The film deliberately raises various question marks as to whether Bateman’s crimes actually happened or were simply figments of his imagination. One recurring motif that seems to imply that they really did happen is the revelation of evidence in unexpected moments of the movie, from the bloodstains Bateman’s dry cleaners fail to remove from his bedsheets to the woman’s head we see cooling in his freezer.

In all, there are six further deaths viewers see clear evidence of, including four bodies (or body parts), one large bloodstain in relation to a woman Bateman met on the street at night, and a model’s lock of hair we see him playing with. In addition to the ten people and one animal killed on screen, that makes for a total of 17 murders during the course of the movie. Exhausting work, even for a psychopath.