Thirty years ago The Silence of the Lambs changed everything
Released 30 years ago in the USA — on Valentine’s Day no less — The Silence of the Lambs was a critical and commercial darling, becoming one of only three films to scoop the ‘Big Five’ at the Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best (Adapted) Screenplay.
Made for just $19m the horror-thriller, adapted from Thomas Harris’s novel of the same name, grossed $272m worldwide.
For those unaware: A serial killer nicknamed ‘Buffalo Bill’ is killing young women and removing their skin. FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is assigned to interview the infamous Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) for insight that could help catch ‘Bill’ (Ted Levine) and rescue his latest victim: the daughter of a senator.
Often heralded as Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece (although this author has a considerable softspot for Something Wild), the runaway success of Lambs spurred two sequels of diminishing quality and countless rip offs and TV series (Clarice just debuted in the USA).
The hard truth is, although the serial killer genre is now saturated ground, nothing has come close to Lambs, with which Demme gave the world the serial killer blueprint for the modern era.
The sequels did not come close to matching him and Demme never returned to the genre himself (he reportedly turned down 2001's Hannibal because he found the book ‘lurid’).
Instead Ridley Scott directed the sequel (which recast Starling with Julianne Moore) and Brett Ratner took on prequel Red Dragon (2002). They’re both ordinary films that over-indulged Hopkins’ iconic Lecter (famously he has just 25 minutes of screen time in Lambs but his presence pervades almost every scene).
With Lambs — which is shorter than both its offspring— Demme knew that more was less and sometimes the shortest scenes can say the most.
Although it was Hopkins’ effete but charming Lecter which entered the 90s zeitgeist (and inspired numerous fictional serial killer copycats), Foster’s Starling is the movie’s real triumph.
A female protagonist on the hunt of a serial killer may seem rote now but Lambs was one of the first (would the BBC have produced Silent Witness, which debuted in 1996, without it?).
Foster’s Starling is stubborn, strong, vulnerable, smart and determined. And more importantly - she is a woman rescuing a woman in a world of men.
There is no ‘love interest’ because there is no need for one — she is singularly focussed on catching Buffalo Bill (although there is a perverse sexual undertone to Starling and Lecter’s meetings).
Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho author, said:
“It (The Silence of the Lambs) contains maybe the most complexly realized heroine in a procedural and two of the most iconic performances in American movies. It seems Demme has been apologizing for its gore and violence ever since, but it’s a nearly perfect film while also a haunting reflection of the George H. W. Bush years in the same way The Coens’ No Country For Old Men seemed like a reflection of the waning years of his son’s presidency.”
Clarice is only picked to interview Lecter because her boss Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) sees her as a pretty face who could appeal to a lonely psychiatrist/cannibal who has so far rebuffed every law department official.
And then on her way to meet Lecter she deftly swerves a crude pick-up attempt by his ‘handler’ Dr Chilton.
Demme deliberately underplays his hand throughout Lambs.
There is no grand outburst or ham-handed moment of clarity from the leering men. Instead the sexism and misogyny is simply an uncomfortable part of Clarice’s reality as a woman.
Speaking to the LA Times in 1991 about reading Harris’s book Demme said:
“I got three pages into the Clarice character, and I knew I wanted to make a movie out of this.
“I love women’s stories. They’re a little harder to find than any other kind of good story, but I love them. Because women are my heroes.
“Don’t you think that by and large women display heightened sensitivities?
“And that they’re engaged in an ongoing, endless, top-heavy-against-them struggle to achieve what they want to achieve? I’m pulling for women. I’ve got enough oestrogen in me to identify with women. I don’t have any difficulty with that.”
In an interview with Deadline Jodie Foster said: “Jonathan Demme is my favourite woman director. He was able to see that Silence Of The Lambs is about a woman.”
Demme, who died in 2017 at the age of 73, earned a reputation through his career for being ‘an actor’s director’.
Not only was there the Lambs success, Philadelphia got Tom Hanks the first of his two Oscars in two years, Mary Steenburgen won for Melvin and Howard, Anne Hathaway was nominated for Rachel Getting Married and Dean Stockwell was nommed for Married to the Mob.
In the late 1980s and early 90s serial killer films were not the hot property they are now.
Michael Mann’s Manhunter, an adaptation of Harris’ Red Dragon, had been a commercial failure in 1986.
The rights to adapt The Silence of the Lambs were won by the struggling Orion Pictures (originally with the plan for Gene Hackman to direct and star).
Orion had endured a torrid end to the 80s with flop after flop (their financial problems were so severe, that at the 63rd Annual Academy Awards in March 1991, host Billy Crystal made reference to the studio’s debt).
But they enjoyed award success that year with Dances with Wolves and Demme was able to put together a dream cast, even if he had, at first, wanted Michelle Pfeiffer for the lead role.
Demme said to Deadline that after the first full cast read through:
“I thought, this could be the scariest movie ever, and I wanted to make that movie. I wanted to make a Psycho-calibre fucking terrifying movie.”
However Foster never saw it is an outright horror movie a la Hitchcock’s Psycho. Instead, she told Demme: “This is a story of a young woman trying to save the life of another young woman.”
There is so much to love in Lambs, from the less-is-more approach to horror, the overarching themes of identity and transformation, to the across-the-board excellence of the acting.
It’s Demme’s use of the camera that still inspires filmmakers today, in particular his point of view (POV) shots:
“By the time I got to Lambs, I was madly in love with close-ups because I’m madly in love with actors, and a basic premise of Lambs is the story about two people, fighting their way into each others heads.
“So the close-ups and the subjective camera stuff, that was something Tak (Fujimoto,) and I were so excited about.”
Speaking at the Austin Film Festival in 2013 alongside Paul Thomas Anderson (perhaps Demme’s biggest fan), he said:
“You want the audience to be in the character’s shoes, operating on the premise that the more deeply into the character’s shoes the audience is, the more they’re going to care about what’s going on.
“It’s scary to see actors act to the camera, they may think you’re insane or something. But we started experimenting and… it worked.
“When we got to The Silence of the Lambs next we decided to really commit to — um, when Jodie — when Clarice is together with Dr Lecter we’re going to have our… because the actors get used to the scene in the looser shots then they get more and more on it the tighter in you get so by the time you get to the close ups, they’re really cooking now.”
“It was invisible to the moviegoers”
Invisible but always unsettling, even now 30 years on.
Lambs remains the only Best Picture-winning horror film (Jordan Peele’s Get Out was nominated in 2017).
Nothing has come close.
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