Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #124: The Silence of the Lambs

A villain you hate to love is a hard thing to come by, but a villain you just plain love is even more of a rarity. Despite being an amoral serial killer who eats his victims, Hannibal Lecter is so charismatic he has become a part of pop culture across four films and a TV show that barred his first name. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) was the second film to feature the character, but it is the one responsible for making him an icon of cinema thanks to award-winning performances by Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal the Cannibal and Jodie Foster as the object of what passes for his affections.

I definitely did my homework on this ghoulish story, having read the book of the same name by Thomas Harris in the late 90s and used it for a book report, much to my teacher’s surprise. Over the years I have read Hannibal the book, seen that movie, watched Anthony Hopkins revisit the role one last time in Red Dragon, and seen Brian Cox first tackle the role in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. Most recently I watched Mads Mikkelsen put his own spin on Lecter in all three seasons of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, a show that was most likely unrealistic, but deliciously campy and bloody. However for some good scares and thrills it is still hard to beat watching Demme’s Oscar-winning film in October for a Halloween fright fest.

The quality of Harris’ books apparently declined with the release of Hannibal Rising, unread by me, but before that one thing you couldn’t deny about the author is he has a fertile imagination for killers. You would think that a psychiatrist who eats his victims would be as bad as it gets, but in The Silence of the Lamb Hannibal Lecter is a consultant of sorts to catch an even bigger threat. Nicknamed “Buffalo Bill” by the press, this serial killer (Ted Levine) kills young women and then skins the corpses, possibly for trophies. Jack the Ripper seems somewhat quaint when compared to the world Lecter inhabits.

Desperate for leads, Jack Crawford (Scott Glen) of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit pulls young Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) out of training to interview Lecter in the hopes one serial killer might help to catch another. Of course the problem with interviewing a psychiatrist is that questioning people is part of his day job, hence he usually has the upper hand in their conversations, often delving into Clarice’s past. Yet Clarice is smart and stands her ground, something Crawford probably counts on, and gets Lecter to send her on a search for clues. What she probably did not expect was that said clue would be a man’s severed head with a sphinx moth lodged in its throat, which inspired the film’s poster.

The case takes on even more publicity when “Buffalo Bill’ abducts a U.S senator’s daughter. This also gives Lecter a lot more leverage to negotiate for a new prison cell away from the nefarious Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald), and for the negotiation he is taken to the senator (Diane Baker) while wearing his iconic face mask. The man is quite like an animal: put your fingers too close to the cage and you might lose a finger, or possibly even the arteries in your neck.

Despite the fact he looks and acts like a monster, Clarice and the audience can’t help but like Lecter. He is after all a cultured man who enjoys classical music, can draw scenes from Italy by memory, and genuinely helps Clarice not only with the case, but also with a childhood trauma that involves the sound of lambs being slaughtered.

For better of for worse, Hopkins will forever be associated with the charismatic cannibal, but Foster is also worthy of praise for her performance as the young Clarice who grows a lot during the investigation, and seems genuinely scared in the scene where the killer is right behind her in a dark basement wearing night vision goggles.

Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees ruled horror cinema in the 1980s, but they are mere caricatures when compared to the smart and well-spoken psychiatrist/cannibal of The Silence of the Lambs. Here was a horror movie that could be entertaining, chilling, and damn horrific while offering stellar performances.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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