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. This exposes Dr. Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), the only person who has experience with the virtual reality tech, to Stargher’s unguarded masochistic impulses. As Tarsem says himself, the serial killer plot is a pretext for the imaginative, high art-inflected dream horror that rules Stargher’s unconscious mind. What serial killer films did succeed in the 2000s erred closer to true crime — Memories of Murder, Monster, Zodiac — and pulp was relegated to multi-season TV with hit shows like Dexter.