To say that The Silence of the Lambs has a complicated legacy would be an understatement. Directed by Jonathan Demme and released in 1991, the film made Oscars history, turned Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter into a household name, and spawned countless references, homages, and imitators. It also, accidentally or otherwise, delivered a painful blow to the queer community, triggering conversations around its misjudged handling of trans issues that remain a hot topic, even now.

I find it hard to reflect on The Silence of the Lambs without centering my own experiences with the film. I first saw Silence when I was a young teenager, sneaking downstairs after my parents went to bed to watch whatever horror I could find on our handful of TV channels with the volume turned down way low and a pillow clutched to my chest, ready to cover my eyes at a moment’s notice. I found myself mesmerized by Anthony Hopkins’ intense, unbroken stare as the camera moved inexorably closer to Lecter in his cell, breaching the safe distance between us, leaving me as vulnerable to his devouring mouth and mind as the brave Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster).

It was one of the films that opened my eyes to the fact that horror is an art form. Indeed, when I gained access to a vast reference library at university, I would regularly seek out academic work about Silence despite never studying it directly—reading that would serve me well when I began writing critically about its successor, Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (2013-2015), a few years later.

It’s safe to say I love the film a lot, but, as with many of my loved ones, I can recognize its flaws. So, to mark The Silence of the Lambs’ 35th anniversary, let’s venture back into the bowels of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to examine the history, impact, and controversies of this refined, Academy Award-winning monster with blood dripping from its jowls. Perhaps we’ll even learn something about ourselves along the way. Quid pro quo, after all.

Escaping the Page: The Silence of the Lambs’ Road to Big-Screen Success Began With a Few Hurdles

Despite being the movie most people associate with the name Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs did not mark Lecter’s first appearance on film. The character debuted, albeit tantalizingly briefly, in Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel Red Dragon, which was later adapted into the film Manhunter (1986) by Michael Mann.

Starring Brian Cox as Lecter and William Peterson as Will Graham, the man who caught him, Manhunter (and Cox’s interpretation of Lecter) is criminally underrated. While it has gained a cult following over the years, it vastly underperformed at the box office. So when Harris dropped a sequel to Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, in 1989, producer Dino De Laurentiis opted not to touch it—a decision he quickly came to regret.

As Brian Raftery outlines in his book Hannibal Lecter: A Life, which traces Lecter’s story through his many incarnations, The Silence of the Lambs came close to being a Gene Hackman vehicle next. The actor, who was interested in moving into filmmaking, planned to direct from a script he’d pen himself, while also playing Lecter. He quickly realized he was in over his head, however, and handed over screenwriting duties to Ted Tally before bowing out of the project altogether.

Finally, the novel landed on the desk of Jonathan Demme, fresh off the romantic crime-comedy Married to the Mob (1988). Demme was initially turned off by the bloody material, but soon found himself drawn to protagonist Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee from humble beginnings who is able to catch the elusive serial killer Buffalo Bill. With a butt firmly planted in the director’s chair at last and a taut script from Tally ready for the Xerox machine, the film that would forever change horror history began to come together.

An Unholy Trinity: How The Silence of the Lambs Found (And Made) Its Stars

Casting The Silence of the Lambs didn’t happen overnight. Demme envisioned Michelle Phieffer, whom he had worked with on Married to the Mob, for the Starling role, but she turned him down. Next, he suggested Laura Dern, but the film’s distributor, Orion Pictures, nixed the idea on the grounds that she had yet to bag a leading role. All the while, one actor was gunning hard for the part: Jodie Foster, who had recently won an Academy Award for her work in The Accused (1988). Foster wanted the Starling role so badly that she had even tried to secure the film rights to Harris’ novel herself. Her persistence won Demme over—Starling is nothing if not persistent—and Foster signed on in 1989, attending a multi-day training session at Quantico and meeting with women FBI agents and trainees for research later that year.

A fresh Oscar winner was sure to be a box office draw for The Silence of the Lambs. For the Lecter role, though, Demme and co. went in a different direction.

Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter: A Horror Icon Is Born

Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins had dabbled in Hollywood, but by 1989, he was still a relative unknown in America and had returned to the UK to work on its stages and small screens. He had stiff competition when his name was floated for the Lecter part: Demme was considering Sean Connery and Jack Nicholson, both huge stars by the late 80s. But when they passed, the director met with Hopkins and immediately determined that the actor could portray both the razor-sharp intelligence and oddly gentlemanly conduct that make Lecter such a compelling and enduring villain.

Of course, Lecter is far from the only unsavory character occupying the lurid world that Demme and Tally were creating. The role of Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, the killer whose grisly crimes lead Clarice to consult with the slippery Lecter, also went to a relatively unknown actor: Ted Levine, whose resume, like Hopkins’, was largely composed of TV and theater appearances up until that point.

With its unholy trinity cast, The Silence of the Lambs began filming in November 1989, wrapping in March 1990. Theatergoers were about to get the shock of a lifetime.

Leaving No Crumbs: How Silence Took a Bite Out the Box Office (And the Academy)

The Silence of the Lambs opened in theaters on February 14, 1991, serving as the perfect anti-Valentine’s Day movie, perhaps, with its unsettlingly romantic tête-à-têtes between Starling and Lecter, who teasingly warns the young agent that “people will say we’re in love.” (Starling resists Lecter’s influence in Silence, but by the end of the follow-up novel, 1999’s Hannibal, she has been brainwashed into running away with him and engaging in a sexual relationship. It’s… a lot.)

Unlike that decision, The Silence of the Lambs was an enormous hit with critics and audiences alike, grossing almost $131 million at the domestic box office against its $19 million budget. It’s not hard to see why. Foster is a revelation as Starling, perfectly balancing strength and vulnerability as she navigates institutional sexism at the FBI, follows both her training and her intuition on the hunt for Buffalo Bill, and allows herself to get dangerously close to the cunning Dr. Lecter in order to earn his trust and insight.

The Starling character would serve as something of a blueprint for woman-centric thrillers in the years that followed, yet few would manage to capture that same magic that Foster wove into Silence. Foster (and Tally’s script) understood something that many films fail to grasp: women don’t need to be untouchable to be an intellectual match for the likes of Hannibal Lecter. Starling has flaws. They don’t define her.

More flawed (clearly) but equally compelling is Hopkins’ Lecter. Three and a half decades of imitations—not to mention the sequels and prequels—might have taken some of the edge off, but Hopkins’ performance still holds the power to shock and delight in equal measure. His Lecter oscillates seamlessly between soft-spoken charm and quick, sharp cruelty. Physically, he radiates with an unnatural stillness that makes his sudden bursts of movement all the more alarming.

Demme’s direction and Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography are equally deceptive, regularly lulling the viewer into a false sense of security before striking a devastating blow. A prime example is the autopsy of Frederica Bimmel, whose bloated corpse is found in a river with sections of flesh removed from her back. Bimmel’s body is obscured from the viewer as the autopsy gets underway; we experience it through the reactions of the investigators. Then, just as we’re growing complacent, Demme confronts us with a full-body shot of the corpse without warning, forcing us to see the horrific reality of Gumb’s twisted crimes up close.

Audiences in 1991 were terrified, but they couldn’t look away. The Academy was equally transfixed. The Silence of the Lambs snapped up five Oscars at the 64th Academy Awards, including Best Director for Demme, Best Actor for Hopkins, Best Actress for Foster, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Tally. At the end of the night, it even walked away with the coveted Best Picture trophy—making it still, 35 years on, the only horror film to earn that recognition. (Sorry, Sinners. You deserved better.)

The Queer Elephant in the Room: Accusations of Transphobia From Day One

Talking about everything that The Silence of the Lambs did right is easy. Talking about where it may have failed a large segment of its audience is a thornier subject.

Before the film was even released, LGBTQ+ activists expressed concerns about The Silence of the Lambs’ queer- and potentially trans-coded villain, Buffalo Bill, with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) even calling for a boycott. For his part, Levine stated that he did not intentionally play Gumb as queer, instead choosing to portray the killer as a wannabe glam rocker à la Iggy Pop or David Bowie (the latter of whom was on the long list to play Lecter once upon a time—and what a movie that would have been). This approach might sound familiar to fans of Oz Perkins’ Longlegs (2024), one of the many horror films that owes a debt to The Silence of the Lambs, in which Nicolas Cage (himself once a contender for Gumb) plays a killer who also adopts androgynous glam rock aesthetics. (Longlegs would, itself, attract accusations of queerphobia for this portrayal.)

Whatever Levine’s intentions were, the specter of queerness lurks in every corner of Gumb’s dark, moth-infested basement with its mannequins draped in sequins and feathers and the yapping cries of his bichon frisé ringing out. We never get a good look at the woman-suit he is constructing for himself, only a troubling glimpse during the film’s breathless climax. But as Gumb prances in front of his mirror to the haunting synth beats of Q Lazzarus’ “Goodbye Horses,” he does something that was likely more shocking to straight audiences in 1991 than killing women for their skin: he applies lipstick, flicks his nipple ring, and tucks his penis between his legs.

Critical Perspectives on Buffalo Bill

In her seminal study of horror Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol J. Clover states that Gumbs’ issue is “not homosexuality and not heterosexuality but the failure to achieve functional sexuality of any kind.” Jack Halberstam, meanwhile, argues in Skin Shows that Gumb is “indeed a man at odds with gender identity or sexual identity and his self-presentation is a confused mosaic of signifiers… He is a man imitating gender, exaggerating gender, and finally attempting to shed his gender in favor of a new skin. Buffalo Bill is prey to the most virulent conditioning heterosexist culture has to offer—he believes that anatomy is destiny.”

Other critics have taken a less favorable approach. Jos Truitt, for the website Feministing, writes that The Silence of the Lambs is “fundamentally a work of transmisogyny,” arguing that the tucking scene is portrayed as explicitly monstrous. Truitt also points to Lecter’s dismissive statement that Gumb is “not a real transsexual” as an example of the kind of medical gatekeeping that has historically made it difficult for transgender individuals to access the care they need—an issue only exacerbated by fear-mongering about trans people in the media.

The film did itself no favors by omitting a key scene from Harris’ book in which Jack Crawford, who leads the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, speaks with the head of Johns Hopkins’ Gender Identity Clinic, Dr. Danielson. “To even mention Buffalo Bill in the same breath with the problems we treat here is ignorant and unfair and dangerous,” Danielson tells him, adding: “It’s taken years—we’re not through yet—showing the public that transsexuals aren’t crazy, they aren’t perverts…The incidence of violence among transsexuals is a lot lower than in the general population. These are decent people with a real problem—a famously intransigent problem. They deserve help and we can give it. I’m not having a witch hunt here.”

The question of whether or to what extent The Silence of the Lambs is transphobic still comes up regularly in discussions of the film. Levine’s own stance has evolved over the years. The actor recently addressed the issue with The Hollywood Reporter, stating that “it’s unfortunate that the film vilified [transness], and it’s fucking wrong. And you can quote me on that.”

The Silence of the Lambs Is Still a Feast to Behold

There are certainly elements of The Silence of the Lambs that belong in the past. It’s important that we talk about them, and it’s even more important that we include trans voices in that conversation.

Nevertheless, the movie remains as irresistibly quotable and imitable as ever. References to Starling and Lecter continue to crop up in the most unlikely of places, including a staggering number of kids films. Just last year, Zootopia 2 made headlines for its Silence parody, which began life as a four-minute-long, word-for-word recreation of Starling and Lecter’s first meeting before the filmmakers realized, presumably, just how unhinged that would truly be.

The Silence of the Lambs was followed by three more cinematic adventures for Hannibal the Cannibal—Ridley Scott’s Hannibal in 2001, another adaptation of Red Dragon in 2002, and prequel Hannibal Rising in 2007. Later, the hungry, hungry psychiatrist would cook up a cult following on the small screen with the gone-too-soon Hannibal (2013-2015), while Starling would get her own small-screen story continuation with CBS’s short-lived Clarice (2021). Yet, despite my efforts to make more people watch Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, none of these follow-ups would achieve the same stronghold on pop culture that The Silence of the Lambs has maintained. There are a few sour moments, perhaps a bone or two, but Demme’s film is still an extravagant feast for horror fans.

Just don’t look too closely at the meat.