Bret Easton Ellis’ books look like they should be perfect material for the screen. They’re filled with beautiful, amoral young things, designer clothes, pop music, lashings of drugs and casual sex, horrific violence and the sun-drenched landscape of California. His characters inhabit a world already saturated with images drawn from film and television. His fiction helped define the sensibility of the MTV generation, while cribbing liberally from it.

Yet Ellis has proved surprisingly difficult to get right in visual adaptation.

The first challenge is tone. His novels are marked by an unnervingly flat emotional register, narrated by voices drained of feeling – even as extraordinary, terrible things happen.

Characters describe violence and sexual degradation with the same detached precision they bring to discussions of fine dining, designer labels and ridiculously expensive skincare routines. That trademark blankness is difficult to capture on camera. Too little affect, and a performance risks becoming inert. Too much, and Ellis’ carefully calibrated irony gets lost in the visual mix.

The second obstacle is more obvious. Ellis’ fiction remains among the most sexually explicit and graphically violent in contemporary American literature. It forces filmmakers to decide how much to depict, what to omit and where to draw the line. Hollywood has had mixed success. Some directors have understood that Ellis is, above all, a satirist of surfaces. Others have taken those surfaces entirely at face value.

Now, his most recent novel, The Shards has been adapted as a major streaming series. It’s a perfect moment to revisit his screen adaptations, to see which are the best – and the worst.

5. The Informers (2008)

Of all of the Bret Easton Ellis adaptations, this is the one that most completely misses the mark.

Originally published in 1994, The Informers is a collection of interconnected stories set in Los Angeles. Valium-scoffing boomers, spoilt and disaffected offspring, media moguls, burned-out rock stars, aerobics junkies and wannabe actors drift through a city fuelled by copious amounts of hard drugs and casual cruelty. So far, so Ellis.

But even by Ellis’ standards, The Informers contains some pretty outré stuff. I am thinking........

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