FX and Hulu’s forthcoming thriller The Shards, created by Ryan Murphy and based on Bret Easton Ellis’s work, has an indirect link to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction through Roger Avary. Avary, who co-wrote Pulp Fiction with Tarantino, later directed the 2002 adaptation of Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, another story about privileged young people descending into excess and moral emptiness.

The Shards premieres on 5 August and follows wealthy Los Angeles teenagers in the 1980s who are stalked by a masked killer. The Rules of Attraction centres on three students at the fictional Camden College, including Sean Bateman, brother of American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman, and became a cult film for its dark, non-linear rejection of conventional teen-film redemption arcs.