This thesis consists of two primary components: a study of six novels and their respective adaptations into popular commercial films, and my attempt at writing a partial screenplay adaptation of my own previously written novel fragment. I have intentionally chosen to focus upon literary works written in English in the latter half of the twentieth century: they range from the middle 1950s (Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita) to the early 1990s (Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho). Their filmic adaptations range from the late 1960s (John Frankenheimer's The Fixer) to the early twenty first century (Mary Harron's American Psycho). I have specifically focused upon relatively recent works - both literary and filmic - so as to attain some degree of chronological, and thus aesthetic, homogeny in the examples I have studied. Otherwise, the thesis would have been too unwieldy and disparate if I had of included both Classical and Postmodern prose works, or films from both the early twentieth century and early twenty first century. I believe my own screenplay fragment, Eleven A'Bier Place, and the novel fragment from which it is adapted, share some thematic concerns with at least some of the novels and films which I have studied in the thesis. The partial screenplay adaptation I have written references contemporary media in a similar way to American Psycho; it focuses upon drug-crazed criminals as in A Clockwork Orange and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; it depicts the descent into insanity like The Shining. However, it is very much my own work. As far as I can recall I had no specific literary or cinematic precursors in mind when I began the project, although undoubtedly there exist texts which have strongly influenced me in this regard.