Horror Month: Silence of the Lambs (1991)

               This is another fantastic horror film I've seen before. Silence of the Lambs is a brilliant thriller all around. Its deliberately slow pace in the beginning builds up into a stellar climax that leaves the viewer reeling afterwards. The performances are particularly remarkable, Jodie Foster is great as an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer called Buffalo Bill, and Anthony Hopkins delivers arguably one of the most intense and memorable performances in modern film as charming, brilliant, but deeply disturbed killer/psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter. It's hard to think of him as a main character since he's only actually onscreen for 15-20 minutes of the whole film, but every scene he's in is deliciously tense, and his unpredictability makes him all the more enthralling. One of the best scenes in this movie is when he brutally murders two police officers and escapes from a maximum security facility by cutting one of his victim's faces off and putting it on his own, allowing him to escape in an ambulance. Hannibal's seems relatively passive and nonthreatening most times, but as soon as an opening appears for him he's all violent insanity.

             Another scene that I have come to appreciate after repeated viewings is the end of the film, where Jodie Foster's character is exploring the den of Buffalo Bill, trying to find and arrest him. The set design is perfect, creating an extremely sinister, foreboding atmosphere. Everything is filthy, the house is in a severe state of disrepair and the whole place just seems to be a labyrinth of doors and rooms, containing countless hiding places for the  fleeing killer. This leads to an incredibly suspenseful scene where the killer turns off the lights and approaches Foster with night vision goggles on. We see the entire encounter through his eyes, her groping around in the dark, oblivious to his presence while he slowly approaches her and readies his pistol. Although she eventually does kill Buffalo Bill and end his string of grisly murders, the ending of Silence of the Lambs is bittersweet, because while one killer is dead, a much more clever, cunning and brutal one has escaped. This sets the stage for the sequels nicely, but in my opinion none of them are near as good as this completely brilliant thriller.