“Well, Clarice — have the lambs stopped screaming?” — Dr. Hannibal Lecter
Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) begins like a Gothic horror movie. With towering trees and a heaping dose of fog, Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto convey a sense of haunting with their very first images. These touches evoke Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films of the 1960s like House of Usher (1960) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) which were exaggerated and experimental but precise due to their small budgets. Demme got his start making films for Corman (who has a small role in the film) and he cut his teeth on those same small budgets and those lessons of precision. In the opening moments of The Silence of the Lambs a tone of almost mythological terror is suggested, but the hero is not a dashing prince of the sort found in fables or a senior investigator in the mold of Clint Eastwood.
In an interview about the making of The Silence of the Lambs on the DVD release Jodie Foster says that she was initially drawn to Clarice Starling because she felt a magnetic pull to the character. Foster grew up reading countless stories of “the prince entering the forbidden forest to slay the Minotaur…
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