Inspired by a recent thread which discussed how Ted Levine (who portrays Leland Stottlemeyer in Monk) played the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs, I rented the film and made myself watch the whole thing. I had been hampered in the past by being too afraid of its intensity.
I’m very glad I saw it - it’s a marvelously tense, well-acted, frightening movie. The gruesome factor was very low, I’m relieved to say. Ted Levine was far scarier than any corpses or bloody montages, and Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins danced a delicate, intriguing pas de deux. I want to see it again!
And the scariest thing of all - I’ve now seen Captain Stottlemeyer’s pubes. Eeeeeeek!
Buffalo Bill was loosely based on Ed Gein, a real life serial killer in the 1950’s with a fascination for female skin.
It was an excellent movie, though some argue that setting up Hannibal as an anti-hero leads to improper social characterization of serial killers and helps raise them to mythic proportions (Jack the Ripper, anyone?).
If you’re not big on gore, I wouldn’t recommend the sequel, Hannibal. The prequel (or remake, as you will) Red Dragon wasn’t bad either, though not as good as SotL.
I saw it for the first time this summer as well. It had been on my list of movies that I really need to see for some time, but when I read the Hopkins had based his performance off of Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter, Hopkins first major film role and one of my favorite movies of all time, I decided I had to see it. I wasn’t disappointed. I have never liked ‘horror’ or ‘suspense’ movies that rely on gore and things jumping through windows to try to scare you, because they don’t work for me. I much prefer an unsettling character like Hannibal.
Aesiron. Suppose you tell us what is a movie you found not to be boring and would describe as frightening and disquieting. If you’re up to it, three examples.
A few years ago I was watching the video of Manhunter, the original movie version of Red Dragon. My son walked in during a scene with Brian Cox as Lecter. He commented, “Wow did Anthony Hopkins rip off this guy for his character in Silence of the Lambs?”
I can’t since I usually don’t watch horror films precisely because I don’t want to be horrified or disquieted and I only watched it because I was out of work due to injury, going through six to eight movies a week via Netflix, and trying to catch up on some of the classic “movies you need to see” that I had never got around to.
I saw it for the first time recently as well. I thought it was an excellent film, a real Gothic (a)morality play. I was principally avoiding it because of the “it’ll keep me awake for a week” factor, but I think that what gore there was is dealt with appropriately and (unfortunately) some of the most shocking and provocative lines have lost some of their power by now because they are so widely quoted (“a nice Chianti”, and so on).
He based Hannibal’s look on Capote as well in Hannibal. He also never blinked on camera when he could help it because he said it added something odd about the character you couldn’t quite detect.
A good observation. Clockwork Orange also made the audience feel sympathy toward a sadistic monster, and this is disquieting in itself.
Let’s see, some comparisons:
Alex is the only likable person in an entire society of icky people. He may be a psychopath, but at least he’s a creative, three-dimensional individual.
Hannibal Lechter, while brilliant, is not very likable, but his murder victims during the film are also not very likable. He talks his detestable prison neighbor into suicide, picks off a couple of grim throwaway prison guards and ambulance personnel, and presumably dines on Chilton, the jerk prison psychiatrist. (Ha! Jerk psychiatrist - get it?) In this way, he works up some sympathy for his character. I think we’d lose all sympathy for him if he carved up Clarice Starling for dinner.
The book had more subtleties than the movie. IIRC, Hannibal was stringing them along when he told them the murderer was a man named Billy Rubin. It turns out he was making a pun on bilirubin, a byproduct of degrading heme, which I believe is found in feces. Basically, he was bullshitting them.
I recently saw “Silence! The Musical!”, a musical based on Silence of the Lambs (the movie, not the book). It was a scream, very funny. It was part of the NY Fringe Festival, so I doubt if it will be coming to a theater near you, but you can hear the music; http://music.mp3lizard.com/jonandal/ (if nothing else, check out the titles).