American Psycho remains and forever will be an iconic title for horror movie fans. But did you know that American Psycho director Mary Harron made another intriguing movie about murder? Before she brought Patrick Bateman from page to screen, Harron made I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, which tells the story of Valerie Solanas, the woman who attempted to kill the Studio 54 regular.
For Harron, the movie, starring Lili Taylor of The Haunting and The Conjuring, came about because she fell into a true-crime rabbit hole. “I’d read all these books about Warhol, and there was just never anything about it,” Harron told me over Zoom, saying Solanas was often reduced to two lines about a “crazy” woman. “It was like a joke. She had an organization called the Society for Cutting Up Men, of which she was the only member… Which is true, she was.”
But then Harron’s curiosity was piqued when she read Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, a critique of the patriarchy that scholars say may or may not have been satire. “I was so knocked out by how brilliant it was. So that was the question: Who is this woman that nobody has written about and nobody cares about, except that she shot Warhol?” And, like all people fascinated by murder, Harron received a lot of pushback.
“Most people thought it was an absolutely terrible thing to make a film about. It was a horror. ‘Why would you want to make a film about somebody so awful?’… Someone said to me, ‘So few films are made about women. Why don’t you make a film about a great woman artist?’” Harron recalled.
“I don’t want to make a film about someone that everybody thinks is great,” she said. “What’s the drama in that?”
In 2026, all your favorite true-crime podcasters and YouTubers have a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips to help create their content. But when Harron was making I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, the deep dive alone was a Sisyphean feat. “Everything is so different now in terms of research,” Harron observed. “Just trying to track people down was so hard. I was never able to track her family down because I didn’t know the sister’s married name.”
Now, Harron quipped, “I could have just now talked to AI and said, ‘How do I find out somebody’s married name?’ And they would tell me, hopefully accurately… maybe not.” But Harron sees her arguably arduous research process for I SHOT ANDY WARHOL as a positive experience. “I kind of feel sorry for people who don’t have to do what I did, because it was years of sitting in the New York Public Library reading room: Going through old magazines, going through every book on Warhol, and looking through the index and finding little references,” she recalled. “Looking through microfilm [or] microfiche of old newspaper accounts.”
“It was a gradual getting to know her,” Harron said, adding that a “real obsession built up.” She sought to immerse herself in Solanas’ world, looking through late ‘60s issues of local underground magazines and traveling to Solanas’ alma mater, the University of Maryland. She was always trying to find the next piece of the puzzle.
Violence and the people who perpetrate it seem to be a throughline in Harron’s work, but she’s always approaching it thoughtfully. What may come as an immense surprise to the young people making Patrick Bateman edits on TikTok is that Harron is actually not big on extreme horror. “I love thrillers and scary things, but I’m not a big graphic horror person. Like I’m squeamish, actually… I’m serious,” Harron said, adding, “I never wanted to do the very graphic stuff in American Psycho.” She’s always been a fan of Alfred Hitchcock and his style of horror.
“I just like scaring people. I do want to scare people, but a lot of that is just in your mind,” Harron said. For the moment in the film when Andy Warhol gets shot, Harron shared that she wanted to illustrate the idea of time standing still. “There’s an awkwardness in real-life violence, [when] suddenly somebody does something. I think that really happened. I also love that idea that somehow in the midst of a normal day, somebody’s doing something like this and then, when she shoots him, everybody’s kind of paralyzed.”
For the film’s release and screenings this coming weekend, Harron is mainly excited to see younger audiences engage with her film, especially the elements of marginalization that may have been more shocking in previous decades. One of the central characters in I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, Candy Darling, is looking to transition. Solanas has her own journey with queerness. Sex work is also a motif.
Not only is it fitting that the re-release of the film takes place this June, during Pride, but, as Harron pointed out, the IFC Center where the film is screening is a short distance from the Stonewall Inn. “America is going through a very conservative period right now, at least in terms of the White House. America always has these debates… It always has these underground, radical movements, and people fighting against the main society.”
I Shot Andy Warhol is screening at New York City’s IFC Center this weekend, with a nationwide theater run to follow.
- Fri. June 12 at 7:15PM — Q&A with Mary Harron
- Sat. June 13 at 6:45PM — Q&A with Mary Harron, Michael Imperioli, DP Ellen Kuras, and more…
- Sun. June 14 at 6:45PM — Q&A with Mary Harron and Lili Taylor
