Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Longlegs” and “Cure.”

The oozy, hypnotic dread of “Longlegs” may be scaring up dreams of “Seven” and “The Silence of the Lambs” as a mid-‘90s-set thriller about the games between a serial killer and an FBI agent. But there’s another movie Osgood Perkins’ Nicolas Cage-starrer (now a record-smashing box office hit for Neon) shares a darker kinship with.

That’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure” from 1997, a gruesome serial killer tour de force the Japanese director himself was inspired by David Fincher’s “Seven” to make. “Cure,” a dripping-with-atmosphere philosophical crime thriller also about a seemingly psychic (and in this case amnesiac) killer a la Cage’s title character in “Longlegs,” stars the great Koji Yakusho as a Tokyo Metropolitan Police detective on the trail of a string of bizarre slayings that defy explanation. Each crime scene finds the killer close by,...