The Silence of the Lambs (1991) on Netflix
Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee, is sent to question Dr. Hannibal Lecter, jailed for murder and cannibalism. He may help explain a killer who murders young women and takes their skin.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb8.6/101,749,540 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes95%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jack Crawford, who heads the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI academy in Quantico, sends trainee Clarice Starling to a hospital for the criminally insane in Baltimore to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist convicted of murder and cannibalism. Officially she is conducting a psychological survey, but Crawford wants Lecter's help with Buffalo Bill, an unknown killer who murders young women and takes their skin. The hospital's director, Dr. Frederick Chilton, makes advances toward Starling before leading her to the cell. Lecter is courteous at first, then dismissive once he works out why she has come. He asks for details of her own life in return for talking.
Cast
- Lawrence A. Bonneyas FBI Instructor
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To prepare for the role, Scott Glenn met John E. Douglas, who gave him a tour of the Quantico facility and played him a tape serial killers Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris had made of themselves torturing a 16-year-old girl; Glenn wept and changed his liberal stance on the death penalty.
- Sean Connery was Demme's first choice to play Hannibal Lecter and turned it down; when Anthony Hopkins's agent said a script called The Silence of the Lambs was coming, Hopkins joked "Is it a children's story?" before reading it and calling it "the best part I've ever read."
- Gene Hackman withdrew from the project when Tally was about halfway through the first draft, because his children wanted him to stop doing violent films, and the financing fell through.
- Anthony Hopkins built Lecter's stillness and speech patterns from the HAL 9000 computer and writer Truman Capote's voice, and later said he had not, as some assumed, based his cadence on Katharine Hepburn or his unblinking stare on Charles Manson.
- Feminist Betty Friedan said in a 1992 Playboy interview that she found it "absolutely outrageous" the film won four Oscars, calling it a story about "the evisceration, the skinning alive of women."
- Demme's first choice to play Clarice Starling was Michelle Pfeiffer, who turned it down saying she "got nervous about the subject matter," and Meg Ryan also declined the part over its gruesome themes.
- The basement pit used by Buffalo Bill to hold his captives was designed based on the real-life kidnappings and murders committed by Gary M. Heidnik.
- The real Pennsylvania Victorian house used as Buffalo Bill's home went up for sale for $300,000 in 2015, sat on the market for nearly a year, and finally sold for only $195,000.
