The Rules of Attraction is a 2002 black comedy drama film written and directed by Roger Avary, based on Bret Easton Ellis' 1987 novel.

It stars James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder, Jessica Biel, Kate Bosworth, Kip Pardue, and Joel Michaely.

[5][6] Set in the fictional Camden College in New Hampshire, the film opens at the "End of the World" party, where students Lauren Hynde, Paul Denton, and Sean Bateman give apathetic interior monologues on their lives and briefly exchange glances with one another.

A bruised and beaten Sean is shown drinking a whole bottle of Jack Daniel's, tearing up a series of purple letters, before approaching and having sex with a blonde girl at the party.

While Paul is visiting his friend "Dick", Sean, under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms, has sex with Lauren's roommate Lara at the "Dressed to Get Fucked" party.

It is then revealed that another, unnamed cafeteria girl is the author of Sean's love letters; after seeing him leave the party with Lara, she sends him a suicide note before cutting her wrists in the dorm bathtub.

After numerous suicide attempts, Sean fakes his death and, unaware that Lauren recently found a corpse, unintentionally upsets her further when she finds him pretending to be dead.

Additional songs that are in the film are from the era in which the book takes place, including The Cure, Love and Rockets, Public Image Ltd., Blondie, The Go-Go's, Yazoo, and Erasure.

It is an open-source audio format that maintains the simplicity of monaural sound when motion picture delivery requirements include Dolby Digital noise reduction.

[citation needed] The French two-disc Special Edition entitled Les Lois de L'Attraction is the longest known version available.

[13] The BBFC later wrote that "the wider availability of video – including to younger viewers – and the opportunity to replay scenes over and over again, increased the concern to a level which justified the Board's intervention".

[4] According to Stephen Holden of The New York Times, "if The Rules of Attraction,...is a much more faithful novel-to-screen adaptation than American Psycho, its reverence for its source proves to be its biggest problem.

Where Mary Harron re-invented American Psycho as an elegant comic horror film, Roger Avary, who wrote and directed The Rules of Attraction, dives headlong into the depravity roiling in the student body of the fictional Camden College.

Where Ms. Harron shrewdly created a surreal, high-styled ambiance for Mr. Ellis's monstrous humanoids to rattle around in, Mr. Avary wants to convince us that his movie's dissipated symbols of late capitalist excess really exist.

"[16] Richard Corliss characterized the film as a "frenetically chic look at a daisy chain of collegiate craving...Sex, drugs and rack 'n' ruin; pretty people doing nasty things to one another...honestly, what more could you want in a movie?".

[6] In an April 2009 interview, author Ellis stated that the film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction came closest of all the movies based on his books to capturing his sensibility and recreating the world he created in his novels.

He often comments on the attractiveness of each actress, begs Eric Stoltz for work every time he is on screen, and even occasionally sings along with the songs in the film, all the while making a number of self-deprecating jokes.

Bret Easton Ellis later admitted on his podcast that Carrot Top was called in to replace his own commentary, which had been made under the influence of cocaine and tequila and merely observed the action onscreen.