The gruesome misdeeds of an elusive serial killer. The harried detectives in pursuit. The subject matter expert being an imprisoned slayer, and the inevitable chilling consultation with him. The Whisper Man is essentially a 1990s-style serial killer thriller for the smartphone era.

And even then, the new Netflix flick — starring Adam Scott, Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, and Michael Keaton as the Hannibal Lecter-esque figure — features an antagonist who cops the communication methods from decades prior, making creepy recordings on top of old En Vogue cassette tapes, then snail-mailing them to legacy media outlets like he’s a wannabe Zodiac Killer. So it’s not just the style and tone of the film harkening back to thrillers of yore, but it’s the telltale kachunk of a tape deck and the sound of a tongue being dragged over a postage stamp that seals the retro-deal here.

That said, The Whisper Man’s influences are readily apparent, rooted in the post-Anthony-Hopkins-going-on-about-fava-beans era. In people of a certain vintage, the movie will evoke the time when we’d trek to the theater to see Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Denzel Washington or Angelina Jolie — or sometimes various combinations thereof — hunting down and/or being victimized by nasty-nasties, in scenarios that are sometimes all-too-disturbingly rooted in reality, but often Hollywood-ized for the sake of our entertainment.

Without the following classic ’90s serial killer movies — and their new millennium imitators — The Whisper Man probably wouldn’t exist:

1. The multiple Oscar winner — the very rare horror film to earn such honors — was ground zero for a trend that nudged its way into the zeitgeist for a couple of decades. It’s excruciatingly intense, it’s deeply disturbing, it’s immaculately directed and paced, it’s forever quotable: “IT PUTS THE LOTION IN THE BASKET!” Once you see Hopkins as Lecter, the OG serial killer from Hell, worming his way into Agent Clarice Starling’s (Jodie Foster, always great but never better) psyche, you never forget it. An all-timer, and anyone who says otherwise is nuts.

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2. Playing hardened detectives who’ve seen it all but not quite like this, Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt trudge through the rain — endless, drenching buckets of it — chasing a maniac using the seven deadly sins as thematic thread for his gut-churning murders. Director David Fincher is so good at generating bone-chilling atmospherics, if he had directed The Silence of the Lambs, it would’ve been downright apocalyptic. Anyway, I can’t even look at a cardboard box without saying, “What’s in the box? What’s in the baaaaahhhhhhhhhhhxxxxxx,” and then just calling it and going to bed because the day is ruined after invoking one of the most horrifying final-moment twists of any movie ever made. 

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3. This gloomy nailbiter from ’95 stars Sigourney Weaver as a forensic psychologist, Holly Hunter as the detective, and Harry Connick Jr. as the wackjob who mimics the moves of the serial killers he admires. Perhaps that’s an unfortunate metaphor for the progression of the serial killer thriller. In a post-Seven world, the subgenre started getting samey, formulaic. But this one ain’t half bad, holding up fairly well thanks to its compelling performances.

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4. Freeman. Judd. You could theorize that someone shuffled the Seven and Twisted screenplays together if this one hadn’t preceded the latter. But the Seven star more than ably carries this one, playing a hard-bitten detective — note: there are never, I say never, any soft-bitten detectives in these movies — who teams up with Judd after her character escapes the clutches of Casanova, a killer specializing in sexual violence (ironic, considering the movie’s producer, Harvey Weinstein, allegedly assaulted Judd during filming). Derivative? Sure. But cable TV propped this one up until it spawned a 2001 Judd-less sequel, Along Came a Spider, which was a signpost indicating that this genre was creatively bankrupt.

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5. Denzel. Angelina. He’s a bedridden quadriplegic cop. She’s the cop on the beat. Together, they participate in what Roger Ebert called “one of those plots where a depraved serial killer leads everyone in a find-the-corpse version of “Where’s Waldo?’” Oh well. They can’t all be Hannibal and Clarice holding hands and gamboling through a meadow. But The Bone Collector lives and dies by the strength of its leads, who inevitably elevate this into a guilty-pleasure afternoon watch when you’re stuck on the couch with the sniffles.

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6. By my count, Ashley Judd notched three serial killer movies in her career, but none of her roles grind against her sweetheart persona more than this one. She plays a not-soft-bitten homicide cop who has a habit of shtoinking guys she picks up at bars. No issues with any of this — she’s  a liberated woman, allowed to do whatever she wants — but the sitch gets hairy when some of those guys end up on the coroner’s slab, and therefore in her investigations. Did I mention she’s been experiencing blackouts that line up with the murders? This is what you call Bad Optics — or maybe Bad Coptics? And this is kind of a Bad Movie, but that premise is pretty juicy. Maybe it’ll hold up on a rewatch?

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7. I know. These “’90s-style” thrillers are spilling into the 2000s. Sue me. But show me filmmakers and studios who aren’t desperately drafting on decade-old successes in order to rake in some dough, and I’ll show you an entirely vacated Hollywood. Anyway: Jolie. She plays an FBI serial killer sniffer-outter summoned to Canada to ponder the clues carefully and meticulously and purposely left behind by the serial killer, because these guys get some jollies out of teasing the cops trying to bust ’em. Formulaic? Sure. But Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, and Paul Dano turn up in supporting roles, and it all hangs together well enough to be passable.

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8. Denzel. He, Rami Malek and Jared Leto rummage about in a 1990s-coded cop-drama that debuted in 2021, so it’s officially capital-R Retro, a throwback that I remember enjoying even if I don’t remember a bunch of the details. So it goes? It’s gloomy, I remember that much. Oppressively so. Not a bad thing, by any means. Malek and Denzel are the cops, and no one is at all surprised to learn that Leto is a sleaze-ball, and by that I mean, in the context of the narrative of the movie. Loathe him or hate him, Leto’s an entertaining villain. And while Denzel has all the accolades he’ll ever need, he has an entire sub-career elevating so-so movies like this into recommended-with-reservations territory.

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9. Had to end with a banger — and the only film on the list based on a true story. Fincher does it again, casting Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo so he can psychologically torture them into a padded room. Gyllenhaal is a cartoonist with a knack for deciphering codes. Downey is a journalist so hard-bitten you wonder if it’s fatal. Ruffalo is a cop who looks like he sleeps 12 minutes a night, tops. Together, these three men bicker and squabble as they try to piece together clues and taunts left behind by the Zodiac Killer, all falling prey to the kind of obsession that nearly drives them mad. Leave it to Fincher to create a serial killer movie for the ages, about a serial killer who was never f—ing caught. Sleep well, my friends.

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John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.