The Silence Of The Lambs: You Don't Want Hannibal Lecter Inside Your Head

Since 34 episodes (and counting) of Hannibal are not enough to sate my bloodlust, I've been indulging in other pop culture iterations of the Hanniverse. Besides spending an inordinate amount of time on Archive Of Our Own and rereading parts of Thomas Harris's original novels, I've also revisited Manhunter as well as The Silence Of The Lambs.

In 1991, director Jonathan Demme wasn't considered a horror film director. Neither the screenwriter (Ted Tally) nor the cinematographer (Tak Fujimoto) were known for their horror bona fides, either.

Jodie Foster's passion for the role seemed to place her as the ideal cinematic version of Clarice Starling, though she was not considered a horror movie actress. Even though Anthony Hopkins was chosen because of his work in The Elephant Man, anyone who saw his role in Magic knew that he could play creepy as well as, if not better, than anyone.

On IMDB, The Silence Of The Lambs is listed as "Drama, Mystery, Thriller" and while it does contain elements of all three, it's considered a horror film by many. Still, it may have been the other categorizations that allowed it to dominate the Academy Awards, with wins for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay.

In the ensuing years, we've seen so many ludicrous spoofs of Hopkins as Lecter, that his portrayal of Hannibal the Cannibal has lost a lot of its luster. Like a lot of things in pop culture, people remember the imitators, not the originators, and judge the latter by the quality of the former, an unfortunate mistake.

When I saw Silence in theaters in 1991, admittedly, I was a horror newbie, but I found it terrifying. I wondered if it would still hold up after so many years and seeing so many more horror films. The answer is yes.

Composer Howard Shore, although he might be more familiar to younger viewers for his work on The Lord of the Rings films, had a history of scoring horror films: by 1991, he'd already worked on five David Cronenberg films. Part of what makes Silence work as a horror film is the score. It's suspenseful and emotional without being maudlin or clichéd.

Unlike Manhunter - the novel and the film - by Silence, we have already been introduced, albeit briefly, to Hannibal Lecter, so we think we know what to expect. Here we meet Clarice Starling for the first time and Demme wisely piggybacks off of Harris's already well-written character by allowing us to truly see things through Clarice's eyes.

It's Foster's steely yet sympathetic portrayal of Clarice that allows Hopkins's Lecter to be that much more menacing and the film as a whole to be utterly frightening. The F word itself is never used, but there are several allusions made to Starling's feminism: she reminds Dr. Chilton that UVA isn't a charm school and calls Jack Crawford out on his "Clarice, the men are talking" speech at the West Virginia morgue, in addition to brushing off Lecter's pointed sexual questions with a "That doesn't interest me and, frankly, it's the sort of thing that Miggs would say."

Despite her seemingly tough exterior, when she first encounters Hannibal, she's clearly daunted, and who wouldn't be? He's kept in a room that looks like a dungeon and she gets a slew of warnings from both Chilton and Crawford about not engaging with him. The buildup doesn't detract from the film's eventual reveal. In his cell, Hopkins looks akin to Boris Karloff's Mummy, but instead of dead, soulless eyes, his are bright blue and penetrating, extracting your most secret thoughts and fears. Hopkins's vaguely amused face and unblinking, wide eyes are truly unnerving.

Buffalo Bill a.k.a Jame Gumb, while also monstrous, is a different kind of bad guy, albeit one into whom Lecter has quite a bit of insight. When we see Gumb struggling with a broken arm and a couch outside of a windowless van, we know that it's not going to end well for poor Catherine Martin. His viciousness is further demonstrated when we see the waterlogged corpse of his most recently discovered victim displayed in West Virginia. The reactions of the men present show their obvious terror and disgust, but Starling exudes pure empathy. It's that quality which makes our own eventual view of the body that much more horrific. She is more than a just a victim, and Clarice bestows a dignity and human quality upon her, much like the one Senator Martin hoped to convey for her daughter through her televised plea to Buffalo Bill.

It isn't until later in Silence that we see Hannibal Lecter in predator mode and by then, we've almost become accustomed to his quirks. (By then, we've also witnessed the "it rubs the lotion on its skin" scene.) The need to have over a dozen cops creeping through a building with guns drawn might seem like overkill, but when Lecter savagely murders Sergeant Pembry and displays Lieutenant Boyle's corpse we are reminded that he isn't some quirky, demanding college professor, but a genuine, real-life monster.

Although Lecter is now on the loose, Clarice must focus on Gumb, and in the end she is the one who must face him. Her terror in his dark basement is palpable, with his night vision POV foreshadowing the aesthetic most of the found footage canon. Blinded and beyond fear, Starling is both completely out of yet totally within her element. She takes out Gumb like a pro, despite trembling the entire time, and it's a beautiful, heroic scene, sort of like Rachel McAdams's Ani Bezzerides in this season's True Detective shootout sequence, minus all the swearing.

By the time Lecter calls Clarice at her graduation party, she's already dismissed the idea that he would harm her. We see him slowly stalking Chilton, but only Chilton's grandmother could have sympathy for him at this point in the film. Clarice Starling shares something with Hannibal Lecter, and although she isn't a murderous psychopathic cannibal, that's enough to drive home the point that the monster walks among us.

The Unpredictability Of Repugnance

This past week's installment of Hannibal, "Primavera," featured one of the more revolting scenes of the show (which is saying something). During one of Will Graham's empathing episodes, a skinned, dismembered, reconfigured corpse comes to life, sprouts hooves and antlers, and moves menacingly towards him.

Show creator Bryan Fuller dubbed the creation "Stagenstein," while production sketches for the show called it "Stumpman." (I'm partial to my own term, "Cronenstag.") This concoction is more grotesque than Mason Verger eating parts of his own face in Season Two's "Tome-wan." I remained fascinated and could not look away, even rewatching animated GIFs of the Cronenstag on Tumblr.

I've talked before about "the uncanny," in which things are both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Somehow Cronenstag seemed worse to me. On the one hand it was a wet, fleshy creature that moved realistically. On the other hand, I know in my gut that it isn't real. So why the disgust and fear?

In many ways, this scene reminded me of the film Splice. (Vincenzo Natali, who wrote and directed Splice, also directed "Primavera.") The movie is one of the best examples of that Mystery Science Theater 3000 cliché, "he tampered in God's domain."

Two scientists (Elsa and Clive) develop animal hybrids for a genetic research company. Explicitly prevented by the company from adding human DNA into the mix, they conduct their human/animal hybrid genetic research in secret, eventually giving birth to a creature they refer to as "Dren." Dren is decidedly creepy and looks not totally unlike Hannibal's Cronenstag, with her spidery limbs and hoof-like feet.

Again, watching Splice I know that Dren is a cinematic creation and thus unreal. Still, Splice is one of the most disturbing and unpleasant films I've seen in recent memory precisely because it's so obviously unreal but could very well exist. As Natali noted in an interview on the film: "The centerpiece of the movie is a creature which goes through a dramatic evolutionary process. The goal is to create something shocking but also very subtle and completely believable."

Natali has explained in several interviews that the idea of Splice came from his encounter with the Vacanti mouse. In this experiment, scientists seeded "cow cartilage cells into a biodegradable ear-shaped mold" and then implanted it "under the skin of the mouse." (As an odd side note, the "nude mouse" on which the structure was grown is not a genetic experiment, but a spontaneous genetic mutation.) Are we repulsed by these images because we don't want to accept that such genetic experiments could actually be real? After all, the advent of cinematic technology has developed hand in hand with scientific technology; what filmmakers can create visually may not be so far removed from what scientists have created in labs.

Dren isn't the only creepy thing in Splice. Elsa and Clive also develop a pair of seemingly amorphous blobs named Fred and Ginger. These critters have been copyrighted and will be used to create livestock feed (an ethical quagmire in its own right). Fred and Ginger, like Dren, resemble what an article on sculptor Patricia Piccinini refers to as "parahuman." "Piccinini's parahuman beings are both uncannily real and somewhat disturbing. Certain people have a hard time with these works or find them so disturbing they can't stay near them."

Parahuman creatures like Cronenstag, Dren, or Fred and Ginger all recall what bioconservative scientist Leon Kass has called the "wisdom of repugnance." From Wikipedia: "In all cases, it expresses the view that one's 'gut reaction' might justify objecting to some practice even in the absence of a persuasive rational case against that practice." Since the "wisdom of repugnance" can also be used to justify prejudice against others on the basis of race, sexual orientation, disability, and a host of other factors, it's a problematic concept that has been the subject of much criticism. It can be argued that such prejudices reveal more about the repugnant qualities of the person who is objecting to another entity, i.e., that he is himself racist, sexist, or ableist.

In the case of Splice and the Cronenstag at least, repugnance is still a real reaction to something seemingly unreal. It begs the question: at what point does fascination veer into disgust or disgust into fascination? That's the precise kind of liminal space that both Splice and the Cronenstag occupy. It's a question whose answer can't be predicted, and that's scary.