Movie Review: The Silence of the Lambs

"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti."

The Silence of the Lambs is a great movie. It's a dramatic, psychological thriller that has become one of the best (and scariest) horror movies of all time - ranked up there with the likes of The Exorcist. Doctor Hannibal Lector, as a villain, far surpasses the superhuman baddies of traditional horror films in so many ways. He's more interesting. He can get into your head by just speaking. He's cultured and enormously more intelligent. He's more frightening than any machete swinger or vengeful spirit. He has a somehow creepy sense of smell. And he eats people. His escape from custody is impressive. It's become almost cliché for a character to wear the clothes of a subdued enemy to protect himself in an environment teaming with that enemy's comrades. Doctor Lector goes further. Yes, he takes and wears the uniform of a downed cop, but he also cuts the face off the cop and wears it to play the part of the injured officer. His unmasking in the ambulance is disturbing.

Lector is not the only monster of the movie. There's serial killer Jame Gumb, known to the authorities, the press, and the public as Buffalo Bill. The psychopath captures heavy women, starves them for three days to loosen their skin, provides lotion to keep their skin healthy ("It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.") and then kills them and skins them. It actually gets worse. He uses the skin he flays from the corpses to sew together clothing that he can wear and try to be the woman he thinks he should be.

Two monsters (that are both more frightening than standard horror baddies) share this film, but only one is really the bad guy. Jame Gumb is the villain. Sure, Lector is evil, but he's not the main antagonist in this story. He develops the character of Clarice Starling. He makes her a stronger person and leads her around, helping her identify 'Bill.' He offers his psychiatric expertise in catching Buffalo Bill in exchange for being moved to a different correctional facility - a move that he uses successfully as his opportunity to escape custody. His line to Clarice over the phone at the end is wonderful. He manages to follow his former disagreeable warden to Jamaica (where he's presumably gone to hide from the escaped Lector) and tells her, "I'm going to have an old friend for dinner."