Every once in a while, a film is released which revives its dead genre. In the early '90s, for the horror/thriller genre, The Silence of the Lambs was that film. After a tribe of awful horror flicks (e.g. 1988's Child's Play) with recycled story lines like serial killers hunting dumb teens, The Silence of the Lambs took the serial killer movie to a new level.
The Silence of the Lambs swept the 1991 Academy Awards, becoming only the third film in history - after 1934's It Happened One Night and 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - to win all five major categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay), and the first horror movie to win Best Picture. This is a tremendous achievement when it was released more than 12 months before, considering the Academy's notoriously short attention span. Each award was well deserved, with Best Director Jonathan Demme both marvellously pulling off the most gripping scenes and never losing sight of the human element of the picture, Best Actor Anthony Hopkins and Best Actress Jodie Foster both delivering unforgettable performances as the dangerously intelligent cannibal serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter and the less-than-perfect but strong willed rookie FBI Agent Clarice Starling, and Ted Tally's Best Adapted Screenplay both delivering snappy, quotable dialogue ("Oh, and Senator, one more thing: LOVE your suit!") and perfectly tapping into the mind of a serial killer.
This is the horror film that they all want to be, but almost all of them won't. I've only ever seen one other that is in quite the same league as this, and that is The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan must have watched TSOTL about 12 times while making that film). This groundbreaking masterpiece of horror is the standard by which all other horror movies are measured, and it is indeed the film that for which Hopkins, Foster and Demme will all be remembered.
10/10.
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