Bryan Singer's first feature, "Public Access," marked the director as a very serious young man, and his second, 1995's "The Usual Suspects," brought him to the attention of a larger audience. His compelling, ambitious "Apt Pupil," made with an astonishing degree of visual control, distills Stephen King's novella wherein a high-school boy, Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), nurtures his inner Nazi with the help of an escaped war criminal, Arthur Denker (Ian McKellen).

With the performances Singer draws from the pair in the game of intergenerational cat-and-mouse, you wish he had gone deeper, in examining how Todd's fascination with the crimes of the Holocaust lead him to toss away much of his humanity. Singer's concern, he says, was in keeping to the mood of King's work, but "adapting any novel is difficult. The book takes place over four years, with Todd's age going from 14 to 18. I didn't want to do that with the movie, so I tried to localize it with a 16-year-old senior. The book involved a lot of ultraviolence and murder, and although it worked so beautifully on the page, in the film world it might become less believable, and repetitive and exploitative."

Singer sees "Apt Pupil" as a straightforward horror tale. "The essence of the story is still there, psychological horror, that's what this movie is, it's a horror film." Singer doesn't find the on-screen violence as important as the shift in roles between Bowden and Denker. "The violence is all from the book. It was a matter of subtracting. In the book, they both become serial killers and at the end, Todd goes out with his rifle his father gave him and he dry-fires - with no bullets - at the cars on the freeway, kills his guidance counselor, then waits for five-and-a-half hours as it's nearly dark, before the police take him down. I loved it in the book, the perpetuation of this evil from the past, from Europe, manifesting itself on the world against homeless people, indigents, and eventually to people driving along the freeway. The trouble is, if you show an audience that visually, they're going to get real tired of seeing bums get whacked. And how do you end it? We decided to play psychological games."