The success of The Silence of the Lambs did not go unnoticed by 1990s Hollywood. Earning $250 million more than its budget at the box office and winning a historic array of Oscars, Jonathan Demme’s Hannibal Lecter adaptation ignited a hunger for sadistic killers and detectives versed in absurd, simplified psychology. Many of the attempts to recapture Lambs’ success were not quite realistic, but at least grounded in a non-fantastical reality, like Se7en, The Bone Collector, Primal Fear, Kiss the Girls, and the very aptly titled Copycat.
But as the decade wore on, more ambitious (and ludicrous) serial killer thrillers emerged to test the balance of heightened pulp and psychological edge central to Demme’s success. The same year as Se7en, Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe played cat and mouse respectively in the sci-fi thriller Virtuosity, where a detective hunts down a virtual reality program consisting of multiple serial killer personalities. Outside of Hollywood, Japanese genre maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa drained the genre of its perverse pleasure with Cure, a thriller about an enigmatic amnesiac who triggers existential murders with hypnotic cues.
