At the end of the first preview of The silence of the lambs, when the credits began, the public remained in an eerie silence. There were no sighs or awkward laughter. There was no applause. Just silence. Screenwriter Ted Tally didn’t know what to do. He turned to director Jonathan Demme and whispered, “Isn’t this movie too scary?
It could be, “Demme said. But in the hours and days that followed, word of mouth began to spread like wildfire. The dark story about a serial killer had struck a chord. That silence in the movie theater proved to be worth his time. weight in gold.
With a slightly perverse sense of timing, the film was released on February 14, 1991, Valentine’s Day. It became a success (total gross: $ 273 million) and the first horror movie (here are the 60 scariest horror films in history) to win the Oscar for best picture. It is not only the best and scariest movie of the 90s, but also one of those rare movies that is better than the – also very good – book. Jodie Foster offered audiences a new kind of cinematic heroine with her portrayal of Clarice Starling, while Anthony Hopkins (whose TikTok is the best way to brighten your day) conveyed the controlled threat of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, an all-too-human monster who would become in an archetype for other cultured serial killers on the big screen.
But the genesis of this modern classic was no easy task. Indeed, like the movie itself, it had been a nightmare: an agony of false starts, financial crises, and angry calls for a boycott. On the 30th anniversary of The silence of the lambs, the film reminds us of a time when studios still dared to invest a large sum of money in a dark project, without superheroes or special effects. American writer Thomas Harris, who started out as an event reporter, introduced his character Hannibal Lecter in the novel Red Dragon (nineteen eighty one). That book, about a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibal advising an FBI profiler, was adapted by Michael Mann in 1986 into the underrated Manhunter, with Brian Cox, the series’ pater families Succession, in the role of Lecter. When Manhunter failed, producer Dino de Laurentiis resigned from filming Harris’ sequel in 1988, The silence of the lambs. But one of the people who didn’t let that stop him was Gene Hackman. The actor had read the novel and immediately realized that it was the right material for his directorial debut. Hackman, in 1988, at the height of his fame with an Oscar nomination for his role in Arde Mississippi, managed to convince the downcast Orion Pictures to buy half the rights. He bought the other half himself and wanted to play Lecter. But then her daughter read the book. He got upset and Papa Hackman dropped out of the project.
Undaunted, Orion decided to move on with the film. Without Hackman, the studio had to find a new director, and quickly. At the time, forty-year-old Jonathan Demme was a surprisingly eclectic filmmaker, equally at home with studies of an artistic nature (Melvin y Howard), concert recordings (Stop Making Sense) and screwball comedies (Something wild). It wasn’t the most obvious choice for such a shocking story, but Demme was delighted to delve into the depths of the human soul with a character like Lecter. I wanted to make a terrifying thriller of the caliber of Psychosis“Demme said at the time.
Demme’s first choice for the role of FBI agent Clarice Starling was Michelle Pfeiffer, who starred in her previous film. Married to everyone. But Pfeiffer was unhappy with the story’s rather raw violence and resigned from the role. Fortunately, Jodie Foster had also read Harris’s novel. Foster practically begged Demme to let him play the role of Starling (perhaps in part as an incantation from his own encounter with evil: John Hinckley Jr. had tried to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981 to impress Foster). What I like about Clarice Starling is that she can be one of the first heroines who is not an exaggerated female version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, “said Foster. ‘Clarice is very competent and very human.’
For the role of Lecter, the studio wanted Sean Connery. But, like Pfeiffer, the subject discouraged him. Anthony Hopkins, while considered one of the most gifted (and intense) actors of his generation at the time, was not a mass actor. Orion decided to try anyway. Hopkins: “I read the script and suddenly I felt how to interpret it.” Hopkins described his Lecter as a combination of Katherine Hepburn, Truman Capote, and the HAL computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. To add to the strange relationship between their two characters, Foster and Hopkins didn’t speak for a moment when the cameras weren’t rolling.
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When The silence of the lambs was about to release, there was a problem: Orion was almost bankrupt and the studio couldn’t afford to release that much The silence of the lambs Like the great Christmas movie of 1990 Dancing with Wolves. So Lecter disappeared into obscurity for a few months and the film did not come out until February 1991. The film was an immediate success, both with audiences and critics.
But not everyone was in favor of the movie. LGBTQ activists demonstrated in theaters against the negative portrayal of the transgender character Buffalo Bill, played by Ted Levine. The clamor did not penetrate the ranks of the Academy, which awarded The silence of the lambs with seven Oscar nominations.
The movie that started with Gene Hackman and ran right under the noses of Michelle Pfeiffer and Sean Connery has now become the third movie ever (after It happened one night, in 1934, and from Some one flies over the cuco’s nidus, in 1975) to win the “big five” at the Oscars: best screenplay, best male lead, best leading actress, best director and best film.
Thirty years later The silence of the lambs it’s still as bright and creepy as it was then. It was followed by three other films (Hannibal (2001), The Red Dragon (2002) and
Hannibal: Origin of Evil (2007)), as well as the award-winning NBC series Hannibal. At the beginning of this year a new series was released, on the American network CBS, entitled Clarice.
Hannibal Lecter is the bogeyman we unintentionally – and probably to our shame – sympathize with. Although Lecter only appears on the big screen for a total of sixteen minutes in The silence of the lambs, his meat hook has lodged in the depths of our psyche. Decades before we developed an obsession with “real” crime, this was an infinitely scarier movie than anything we knew. The silence of the lambs made it clear that evil can be seductively hypnotic, especially when paired with good Chianti.
And to celebrate it, we invite you to read our list of the best horror movies of the 21st century: the best horror movies year after year.
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