Silence Of The Lambs Essay

The immensely thrilling movie The Silence of the Lambs, filmed in 1991 by Jonathan Demme, slams you like a blast of bone-chilling, pulse pounding, pure, unfiltered terror. Clarice Sterling, is an FBI trainee brought in to find Buffalo Bill, a man who has compelled every large woman into thinking about some of their most terrifying nightmares: a man kidnapping them to steal their skin. Her search leads to the home of dressmaker Jame Gumb, and eventually the finding of his , where he shoots and skins his victims.

The movie begins when Special Agent Jack Crawford calls Starling in to interview Hannibal Lecter (a.k.a Hannibal the Cannibal) ,a former psychiatrist imprisoned in a mental asylum for carving up nine people and eating them. Crawford

Sterling is able to sweet-talk her way into the place where Lecter is being held prior to his transfer, in an attempt to squeeze him for information. Sticking to the second half of their deal, she relives the reasons she sometimes wakes to hear the lambs screaming, one of her most feared nightmares. As she reaches between the bars to take the case files for Buffalo Bill, and their fingers touch for a brief moment, but that is enough- the electricity flowing through them proves the consequences of misplaced trust. In the scenes that follow, Lecter escapes by devouring two guards’ faces, wearing one face as a mask, and Sterling finds herself alone with Jame Gumb, pursuing him throughout his whole home before emptying her magazine into his torso. After she graduates, she gets a phone call from Lecter, who is telling her not to worry about him coming after her, since “the world is a better place with your intelligent mind in it, Clarice Sterling.”

Throughout the film, Jonathan Demme is able to keep thrill-seeking adventurists on the edge of their seats. This movie is a classic that turned the tides for horror movies forever; it showed that horror is much more than the monsters hiding under your bed, it can be things you see every day. It showed that you could come face-to-face with a lunatic every day, and never know it. It proved what a truly psychotic person can do, and that pathological serial killers are hiding right beneath your nose, with a cool and calm demeanor. It inserted fear into anyone with skin, and is truly a work of