Twenty-five years ago this week, the now-defunct Orion Pictures hit theaters with The Silence of the Lambs, the second cinematic outing for notorious screen serial killer Hannibal Lecter, after 1986’s Manhunter. Starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, the film quickly became a sensation, entering dozens of references into the pop-cultural psyche, turning Lecter into a larger-than-life icon for film villainy, and ultimately taking home the Academy Award for Best Picture. It spawned a sequel, two prequels, and an NBC television series, plus countless parodies and references over the years. It’s among our most legendary motion pictures.
In honor of the film’s 25th anniversary, here are ten things about The Silence of the Lambs that you probably didn’t know.
Gene Hackman was originally going to make the movie.
Before Thomas Harris’ novel The Silence of the Lambs was even released, Gene Hackman and Orion teamed up to acquire the rights, with Hackman set to direct and star. At some point after Hackman made Mississippi Burning, however, he got concerned about making overly violent films, and he backed away from the project, paving the way for director Jonathan Demme. Hackman would go on to win a second Oscar for 1992’s Unforgiven, but he would actually never get around to directing a film.
Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter, and Buffalo Bill all had real-life inspirations.
While Buffalo Bill was partly based on notorious figure Ed Gein — who was famously also the inspiration for Norman Bates in Psycho and Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — Thomas Harris got the idea for an FBI agent using an incarcerated serial killer to catch another killer on the loose from the case of the Green River Killer, where criminal profiler Robert Keppel sought out the help of Ted Bundy to catch the killer.
Michelle Pfeiffer and Sean Connery were almost the stars.
Big movies often tend to have some great “what might have been” casting decisions. (Take a look at who almost starred in Speed some time.) In the case of The Silence of the Lambs, Michelle Pfeiffer turned down the role of Clarice Starling, and Sean Connery said no to playing Hannibal Lecter. (Among other things, this would have made The Silence of the Lambs an odd reunion of The Russia House.) After Connery passed, Jeremy Irons also said no. Irons won the Oscar for 1990’s Reversal of Fortune; might he have gone back-to-back if he’d taken the award-winning role of Dr. Lecter? Who’s to say? Anthony Hopkins is happy we didn’t ever find out.
The film features cameos by horror directors Roger Corman and George Romero.
Schlock maestro Roger Corman (who directed, among other things, the original Little Shop of Horrors) plays an FBI bigwig who gives Jack Crawford what-for for sending a trainee to see Hannibal Lecter. Romero (Night of the Living Dead) is harder to spot. You can see him accompanying Dr. Chilton when he comes to drag Clarice away from her final meeting with Lecter.
Anthony Hopkins only has about 16 minutes of screen time.
It’s even more remarkable that Hannibal Lecter looms so large over this movie considering he’s hardly ever on the screen. At 16 minutes of screen time, Hopkins gave the second-shortest performance to ever win a Best Actor Oscar. (David Niven in Separate Tables had about 15 and a half minutes.) In fact, in the 1991 awards season, Hopkins won Best Supporting Actor from the National Board of Review and Boston Society of Film Critics.
Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins presented at the Oscars together a full year before they won Best Actor and Best Actress.
Five weeks after The Silence of the Lambs opened in February of ’91, the Academy Awards for 1990 took place. In other words, the NEXT year’s eventual Best Picture winner was already in theaters while Dances With Wolves was being celebrated as the best of 1990. And the next year’s Best Actor and Best Actress winners presented the screenplay awards together.
That famous movie poster was inspired by Salvador Dali.
The Silence of the Lambs may have one of the most recognizable movie posters of all time: the washed-out face of Clarice Starling with a brightly-colored moth covering her mouth. But take a closer look and the poster becomes even more unsettling. In the film, a cocoon of a moth is found inside one of Buffalo Bill’s victims — the so-called “death’s head moth” which has what looks like a skull pattern on its back. There’s a skull on the moth in the poster too, but look closer and you’ll see that skull is composed of seven naked female bodies. It’s an homage to a photo of Salvador Dali by Phillippe Halsman titled In Voluptate Mors. It makes the poster that much more unsettling.
The film drew protests from LGBT groups.
Homophobia in film was a hot topic at the 1991 Oscars. Best Picture nominee JFK featured several nightmarish depictions of gay men which seemed to visually parallel deviant sexuality with a plot to assassinate President Kennedy. Basic Instinct was about to hit theaters and cause a firestorm of its own with its bisexual killers. And then there was The Silence of the Lambs, with Buffalo Bill’s pathology all wrapped up in homoeroticism and transvestism and transgender visual language. Director Jonathan Demme tried to stress that Buffalo Bill wasn’t really a gay character or a trans character at all, but rather a “tormented man who hated himself and wished he was a woman because that would have made him as far away from himself as he possibly could be.”
Which is fair enough, though it’s hard to have expected the LGBT community at that time to be happy with one of the film industry’s few depictions of a trans character — however characterized — being a monstrous serial killer. Gay groups protested the film at the Oscars that year, and while Demme continued to defend the film, he did talk about being alerted to the poor treatment of gay characters in movies as being one of his motivations for making Philadelphia two years later.
Only two Best Picture winners were released earlier in the year than 'The Silence of the Lambs.'
Generally speaking, Oscar contenders are released to the public in the final quarter of the year, so as to maximize visibility when year-end lists are being made and awards ballots are being cast. The Silence of the Lambs was a major outlier in that regard, opening in mid-February. Which meant that it had to keep up its awards momentum for over a year (the Oscars were presented in March in those days) en route to a rather improbable Best Picture win at the subsequent Academy Awards.
No other Best Picture winner since has opened as early in the year. In fact, since the Oscars established their January-December eligibility period in 1934, only two films EVER have opened earlier in the year than The Silence of the Lambs and survived to win Best Picture: The Greatest Show on Earth, which opened on January 10, 1952, and Casablanca, which opened on January 23, 1943.
It was only the third film to sweep the top 5 awards at the Oscars.
Despite being from a genre (horror) that is almost never recognized by the Academy and having fewer nominations (7) than both Bugsy (10) and JFK (8) that year, The Silence of the Lambs dominated the Oscars, winning five trophies. And not just any five: the film swept the five top awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was only the third movie to accomplish this feat (after It Happened One Night in 1934 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975. No film has accomplished this since.
