The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is Jonathan Demme’s psychological horror thriller, adapted by Ted Tally from Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel. A young FBI trainee, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), seeks the help of the imprisoned cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) to catch a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill. It was the second film to feature Lecter, after Manhunter, and the one that made him a pop-culture icon. It remains the only horror film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, as part of a sweep of the “Big Five” Oscars.
At a glance
| Release date | February 14, 1991 (US; premiere in New York City, January 30) |
| Director | Jonathan Demme |
| Writer | Ted Tally (screenplay) |
| Based on | The Silence of the Lambs (1988 novel) by Thomas Harris |
| Starring | Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine |
| Runtime | 118 minutes |
| Rating | R (US); 18 (UK), lowered to 15 in 2017 |
| Budget | $19 million |
| Box office | $272.7 million worldwide |
| Franchise | Hannibal Lecter series: followed by Hannibal (2001), Red Dragon (2002) and Hannibal Rising (2007) |
Plot summary
Clarice Starling, a trainee at the FBI Academy in Quantico, is sent by Behavioral Science Unit chief Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter. He is a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibal killer held at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The official reason is a psychological survey. The real goal is to get Lecter’s insight into “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine), a killer who murders young women and removes their skin.
Lecter toys with Starling, but he is intrigued by her. He offers cryptic clues in exchange for pieces of her past, a game of quid pro quo that becomes the heart of the film. When Bill abducts Catherine Martin, the daughter of a U.S. senator, the clock starts ticking, and the hospital’s vain director, Dr. Chilton, interferes in ways that prove disastrous.
Spoiler section: the ending
Lecter escapes during a transfer, and Working from Lecter’s notes, Starling follows the trail to Ohio, home of Bill’s first victim, and knocks on the door of a man calling himself Jack Gordon. When she spots a death’s-head moth, she realizes he is Jame Gumb, the real Buffalo Bill. In the pitch-black basement, Gumb stalks her with night-vision goggles, but the sound of him cocking his revolver gives him away, and she shoots him. Catherine is rescued. At her FBI Academy graduation party, Starling gets a call from Lecter, who is free somewhere in the tropics and says he is “having an old friend for dinner” as he follows Chilton into a crowd.
Production and behind the scenes
Before the novel was published, Orion Pictures partnered with Gene Hackman to adapt it. Hackman was set to direct and to play either Crawford or Lecter, and the $500,000 cost of the rights was split between him and the studio. The rights to the Lecter character belonged to Manhunter producer Dino De Laurentiis, who let Orion use them for free after that film’s failure. Hackman dropped out midway through Ted Tally’s first draft, and Orion brought in Demme. Demme first wanted Michelle Pfeiffer as Starling and first approached Sean Connery to play Lecter. Foster won the role through her passion for the character.
Principal photography ran from November 15, 1989, to March 1, 1990, mostly in and around Pittsburgh. A Victorian house in Perryopolis, Pennsylvania, became Buffalo Bill’s home. In a rare gesture for the time, the FBI allowed filming at its Quantico academy, and some FBI staff appeared in small parts. Scott Glenn prepared with the FBI profiler John Douglas, who showed him around Quantico. Howard Shore wrote the score, and the cinematographer was Tak Fujimoto. Hopkins has said that his decision to play Lecter as still and unblinking was not based on Charles Manson, despite speculation that it was.
Release and reception
Orion released the film on Valentine’s Day 1991. It took almost $14 million over the four-day Presidents’ Day weekend and stayed at No. 1 for five weeks. It earned $131 million in the U.S. and Canada and about $273 million worldwide, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film of the year globally. It screened at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival, where Demme won the Silver Bear for Best Director. Critics praised Foster, Hopkins and Levine, and Roger Ebert later added it to his Great Movies series as a “horror masterpiece.” It holds a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 86, and audiences gave it an “A−” CinemaScore.
At the 64th Academy Awards it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Hopkins, Best Actress for Foster and Best Adapted Screenplay. Only It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had swept those five before. The film also drew criticism, especially from gay and feminist critics who objected to its portrayal of Buffalo Bill. Lecter says in the film that Bill is “not really transsexual,” and Demme publicly defended the film.
Legacy and influence
The Guardian has noted that screen serial killers before Lecter tended to be masked, monstrous bogeymen, while Hopkins played a highly intelligent man with impeccable manners. That shift shaped decades of crime fiction. AFI ranked the film No. 5 on its list of the most thrilling American films and named Lecter the No. 1 screen villain of all time. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2011. When it was re-released in the UK in 2017, the BBFC lowered its certificate from 18 to 15, reasoning that audiences had grown used to serial-killer crime dramas. Ridley Scott’s sequel, Hannibal (2001), brought back only Hopkins, after Foster and Demme declined. Clarice Starling later got her own TV series, Clarice (2021).
Trivia
- Buffalo Bill was inspired partly by the crimes of Gary M. Heidnik. Like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the story also drew on Ed Gein.
- Distributor Rank claimed that the film’s opening week at London’s Odeon Leicester Square was a world record for a single theater. The next week’s £4,260,472 on 281 screens was a UK record.
- A scene set in the FBI Director’s office was shot in the real office of Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole in Washington, D.C.
- The Perryopolis house used as Buffalo Bill’s home was listed for sale in 2015 for $300,000 and sold about a year later for $195,000.
- The film also received nominations for Best Sound and Best Film Editing, which it lost to Terminator 2: Judgment Day and JFK.
- The death’s-head moth from the film’s poster and plot is a real species. In the story, Gumb imports its caterpillars from Suriname.
Related links
- Hannibal Lecter, Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (characters)
- Hannibal Lecter series
- Manhunter (1986) and Hannibal (2001)
- Jonathan Demme (director) and Ted Tally (screenwriter)
- Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins and Ted Levine (cast)
- Thomas Harris (author)
- Psycho (1960) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), also shaped by the Ed Gein case
