Review: Criterion Edition of 'The Silence of the Lambs'

The horror film had basically been around since the dawn of cinema—Méliès’s still-creepy Le Manoir du diable appearing just a few years after the Lumière Brothers’ earliest experiments—but it remained so disreputable that the fact that a true-blood horror movie such as The Silence of the Lambs could also be a prestige picture was still regarded as something of a novelty a century after Méliès. And Jonathan Demme’s film won all its critical, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and audience plaudits despite being a gory, grisly, transgressive adaptation of a pulp novel. Demme’s pungent Gothic style, Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins’s masterful performances, and a story with a pulpy surface and a pointedly feminist core were all suited to the art houses as well as the multiplexes. That the film’s gigantic artistic and commercial success didn’t actually manage to spark some sort of horror revolution—in fact, the nineties proved to be a really decade of doldrums for the genre—emphasizes how horror hadn't quite gone legit yet and what a lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon The Silence of the Lambs was.

That doesn’t mean the movie is tragically dated, though the fact that the acronym “LGBQT” has become a household word in the ensuing 27 years means that members of that community will no longer be the only ones who take offense to the stereotypical antics of trans serial killer Buffalo Bill. The film’s legacy does not ignore that unfortunate reality, which is addressed in nearly every supplemental feature in the film’s multitudinous DVD and Blu-ray editions.

The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray edition of The Silence of the Lambs gathers every substantial bonus feature from those various discs released by various companies (well, MGM and Criterion, to be precise), while also giving them a 1080p upgrade. Criterion’s latest also adds two significant additions, the most enticing of which will probably be an extra 20 minutes of deleted scenes (this includes eight full minutes with that obnoxious preacher Hannibal Lecter is forced to watch from his cell), though critic Maitland McDonagh’s discussion of serial killers in life and film and the way they pertain to the main feature is the most compelling new perk. She also speaks at length about the Hannibal TV series.

As for that main feature, Criterion’s 4K restoration is one of the best I have ever seen. The film’s muted tones may slightly mute the wow factor, but not by much. You don’t need an eye-full of brilliant colors to appreciate how powerful the definition and depth of this picture are. Some of the exterior scenes practically look 3-D. So those hours and hours of interviews and documentaries are really great, but the real reason to upgrade to this new Criterion blu-ray is the most potent representation of some of the most potent images of nineties cinema.

April 16, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #3

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I'm going to be reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

(Incidentally, The Onion recently posted an article with the exact same premise as this series. While I seriously doubt that I’ve been ripped off, as I’m sure I’m the only one who reads Psychobabble, I just want to point out that I’m not going to allow such repetition to impede the continuation of this series. Onward and upward.)

Case Study #3: Trailer for the film Magic

Released in 1978, Magic was one of those “crazy ventriloquist expresses his craziness through his dummy” stories that had already been done in the British film Dead of Night (1945), episodes of “Twilight Zone”, “Tales from the Crypt” comics, and about half-a-gazillion other places. Still Magic is a decent little movie with Anthony Hopkins working his creepy mojo as the ventriloquist, but what really gained the movie infamy was its trailer.

Apparently, this commercial only aired on TV a few times before it was pulled because stations were inundated with calls from the irate parents of kids who had been emotionally scarred by it. I was four in 1978, and I remember exactly where I was the one and only time I saw this commercial (I was being babysat by a nice old lady who lived down the block). While neither my parents nor the nice old lady placed an irate call to any TV stations on my behalf, I was absolutely horrified by it, the content of which was so utterly traumatizing that in subsequent years I was unsure whether I’d actually seen the commercial or merely nightmared about it. 

The Verdict: On the one hand we have a ventriloquist dummy (always creepy) in unflinching close-up reciting a poem worthy of an Alvin Schwartz book and a final eyes-rolling-back-in-the-head flourish to ensure no one mistakes this for The Muppet Movie. On the other hand, the dummy sounds like Bugs Bunny. Still, that is one fucking creepy dummy, and knowing that enough other kids were screwed up by this thing to get it yanked from the air forces me to conclude that I was justified in my fright.