When Hannibal Lecter Took Over

Brian Raftery | Longreads | January 29, 2026 | 15 minutes (4,256 words)

From Hannibal Lecter: A Life by Brian Raftery. Copyright © 2026 by Brian Raftery.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

One of the first signs that Dr. Hannibal Lecter was finally going to be a big-screen star—and that The Silence of the Lambs was destined to be a hit—came in the form of a memo sent to the offices of Orion Pictures in September 1990. It had been six months since production on the film had wrapped, and the studio had recently held test screenings in Chicago and Boston.

More than 400 moviegoers in each city had been asked to give their feedback on the film, and the results had been encouraging: Despite a couple of walkouts, the viewers had loved Silence—and they had especially loved Lecter. For all of his brutality and bogeyman power, viewers didn’t think of him as a villain. In fact, they wanted even more of him. “Some [moviegoers] indicated that they liked the fact that, at the end, the doctor escaped, [and] got revenge,” noted the report.

At any other studio, such an across-the-board upbeat response would have been reason to rush The Silence of the Lambs into theaters. But by 1990, Orion Pictures was in trouble. The studio had released several commercial hits in the past decade, including RoboCop and Bull Durham. It had even produced a pair of Best Picture winners in Amadeus and Platoon. But a rash of costly duds, such as the Roseanne Barr–Meryl Streep comedy She-Devil, had pushed the studio toward bankruptcy, and execs were focused on Orion’s big movie for 1990: a three-hour-plus western titled Dances with Wolves, directed by first-time filmmaker Kevin Costner.

Due to the studio’s limited resources, The Silence of the Lambs wouldn’t hit theaters until Valentine’s Day, 1991. That meant director Jonathan Demme would have nearly a year to fine-tune his film and build up moviegoers’ anticipation. Having spent his adolescence cutting out old movie ads from newspapers—and later working as a film publicist—he knew the importance of a good marketing campaign. And it was important that his film stand out from the countless low-budget, high-body-count flicks that had dominated the eighties. “He didn’t want it to come across as a slasher movie, like a Texas Chain Saw Whatever,” says former Orion marketing chief Charles O. Glenn. “He wanted a campaign that said, ‘This is a theatrical experience that you do not want to miss. It is formidable. It is frightening.’”

On the set of The Silence of the Lambs in Pittsburgh, Demme had shown Glenn a haunting piece of art featuring a moth with a skull on its thorax. Looking closer, Glenn had realized that the “skull” was actually made up of seven nude female bodies, inspired by a 1951 portrait of Salvador Dalí by the photographer Philippe Halsman.

A version of that human-formed skull image would find its way to Dawn Baillie, a poster designer who’d been born and raised in Los Angeles. “I used to go to Hollywood Boulevard with my grandma all the time to see movies,” Baillie recalls. “Movie theaters were my art gallery. I used to stand and admire the posters, and that’s what I wanted to do.” By the late 1980s, she’d created striking one-sheets for such films as Dirty Dancing and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Earlier in her career, while working at an advertising firm, Baillie had regularly passed a poster for the 1978 serial killer drama The Eyes of Laura Mars, featuring a shadowy close-up of Faye Dunaway. That haunting image would help inform her design for the poster for The Silence of the Lambs. She was given photos from the film, as well as a copy of Ted Tally’s screenplay. Using just those elements for reference—she wasn’t able to look at footage—Baillie selected a close-up picture of Jodie Foster’s face. She then sketched an illustration of Clarice Starling’s mouth covered by a death’s-head moth, effectively silencing her. “There’s a simplicity to it,” she says of the image. “It conveys horror. But it’s elegant, light, beautiful, and a little bit weird.”

For the finished image, Baillie set up a photo shoot with a moth rented from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and later drew the human-formed skull on the insect’s body. She gave Foster’s eyes a Day-Glo orange hue and added the film’s title using a bold, almost razor blade–like font called Opti Binder Style, with The Silence of the Lambs spelled in all lowercase. “It was my attempt to feminize the masculine font,” she says.

Her poster was initially rejected by the Motion Picture Association of America, which worried about the barely visible female nudes appearing on the moth (the image was later replaced by a photo of seven women wearing unitards). But the finished product turned out to be a perfect tease for The Silence of the Lambs—evoking the film’s solemn tone while revealing zero plot points. In the pre-internet era, full-page newspaper ads in publications such as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were crucial to raising awareness of a film. Soon, Baillie’s one-sheet for The Silence of the Lambs would be everywhere. 

In the process of putting together the film, Demme and editor Craig McKay had trimmed Hopkins’s already scant screen time. Several Lecter scenes were removed, including a sequence in which he drives away in his stolen ambulance, wiping blood from his grinning face.

To further stoke interest in the movie, Lecter made an appearance—at least on-screen—at ShoWest, an annual movie-business confab that by 1990 was drawing thousands of movie theater owners. Glenn asked Hopkins to film a cheeky promotional clip in which he’d talk about the film while in character as Lecter. An early script for the video, written before the film landed its February 1991 release date, played up Lecter’s culinary passions: “Hello. I’m Hannibal Lecter. They call me mad, but I’ll be out this fall, and coming to your theater! . . . I can’t wait for you to play our movie, have a little of that popcorn, and maybe soda (slurp, slurp, slurp).”

In truth, moviegoers would be seeing less of Lecter than the filmmakers had originally intended. In the process of putting together the film, Demme and editor Craig McKay had trimmed Hopkins’s already scant screen time. Several Lecter scenes were removed, including a sequence in which he drives away in his stolen ambulance, wiping blood from his grinning face.

Demme also made some crucial additions in the editing room. They included composer Howard Shore’s patiently brooding orchestral score, featuring none of the synth stabs or discordant noises that had been scary-movie hallmarks throughout the 1980s. Other elements of the film’s soundtrack were downright imperceptible. For the scene in which Starling first encounters Lecter in his cell, Demme gave sound editor Ron Bochar specific instructions for the soundtrack: “This is the bowels of the building,” he said. “Let me hear howling and let me hear bowels.” Bochar added all sorts of near-subliminal animal noises to the soundtrack, including screaming sounds he’d recorded for the 1989 Howie Mandel family comedy Little Monsters, which were slowed down and reversed for The Silence of the Lambs. No one watching the film would have noticed the extra audio. But “whenever you’re down there with Lecter,” Bochar said, “there’s this element—it’s a low tone that rises and then comes down again.”

By the fall of 1990, having spent nearly half a year tinkering with the film, Demme was ready to share The Silence of the Lambs with others. “We worked it, and worked it, and worked it,” he said. “And then we knew we had it.” In addition to the test screenings in Boston and Chicago, there was a confidence-boosting fax to the filmmaker from [novelist] Thomas Harris himself. Though he still had no interest in seeing the film, some of the author’s friends and family had been invited to an early showing. “They tell me you have made a superb and stunning movie,” Harris told Demme. “Congratulations, and every good wish.”

The reaction at a New York City screening for the film’s cast and crew was similarly jubilant—though Anthony Heald, who played the snooty, Lecter-hating Dr. Frederick Chilton, was still unconvinced. “Everybody was saying ‘Oh, God, we’ve got a monster hit!” he remembers with a laugh. “And I turned to my wife and said, ‘They’re delusional.’”

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On Friday, February 14, 1991, a Connecticut drama teacher named Art Almquist asked a couple of colleagues if they wanted to see the weekend’s big new movie: The Silence of the Lambs. Almquist worked at a private boarding school, and after a week of dealing with rowdy students, he and his friends needed an escape. “Our school was in this tiny little village,” he says. “And getting into a town with a movie theater was a half-hour drive. So it was always a big event.”

Almquist was a longtime horror fan. But one of his friends, Mary, was hesitant about tagging along. “She said, ‘Oh, God, I don’t know. I just have a hard time with movies that have violence against women in them.’ And I said, ‘I totally get it. But this is Jonathan Demme. Married to the Mob, Stop Making Sense—these are movies that are progressive and surprising. I’m sure it won’t be too much.’”

The three made their way to a packed theater in Torrington for the 7:10 p.m. showing of The Silence of the Lambs, which was playing alongside Home Alone and the John Goodman comedy King Ralph. More than an hour into the film, during a scene in which Buffalo Bill taunts the captive Catherine Martin—a moment that features both characters screaming directly into the camera—Mary got up and headed to the lobby. She was soon spotted by a worker at the concession stand.

“What movie are you seeing?” the employee asked.

“The Silence of the Lambs.”

“What scene they on?”

“She’s screaming in the well, and he’s imitating her.”

The employee shook her head. “Oh, honey, it just gets worse.”

In the weeks and months that followed, moviegoers watched The Silence of the Lambs with a mix of awe, excitement, and terror. Not long after the film opened, a nineteen-year-old Penn State University student named Shayne Buchwald caught The Silence of the Lambs at a small theater in York, Pennsylvania. She was accompanied by her boyfriend, “a big guy who looks like Spencer Tracy,” she remembers. “He was probably holding my hand, because he was a bit of a wimp.” During a moment in which Starling discovers the deformed head of one of Lecter’s ex-patients in a jar, Buchwald’s date became so startled that he accidentally elbowed her in the face, causing her nose to bleed. Buchwald quickly grabbed a tissue and kept it plugged in her nose for the rest of the night. There was no way she was going to miss a minute of the film. “It was fascinating and terrifying at the same time,” she says.

”I haven’t heard anything but silence when people walk out of the movie,” noted the manager of a Los Angeles theater. “They come out emotionally drained.”

Buchwald remembers her fellow moviegoers remaining quiet throughout The Silence of the Lambs’ 118-minute running time—a communal phenomenon that was playing out nationwide. Never before or since has a Valentine’s Day–timed film yielded so many stress-packed, romance-free nights. ”I haven’t heard anything but silence when people walk out of the movie,” noted the manager of a Los Angeles theater. “They come out emotionally drained.”

Moviegoers heading into The Silence of the Lambs had been given fair warning about the film’s many shocks. The trailer opened with a few quick shots of Lecter, followed by Scott Glenn as Jack Crawford looking straight into the camera while asking, “You spook easily, Starling?”—as if he were daring the audience. 

But in the prespoiler era, it was possible to buy a ticket for Demme’s movie completely unaware of just how bizarre and dark the movie would get. And there were plenty of eager audience members lining up for the movie’s first weekend, thanks in no small part to critics’ reviews of the film, nearly all of them overwhelmingly ecstatic.

In The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “pop film making of a high order,” while Los Angeles Times critic Sheila Benson (who’d been critical of Manhunter) described Demme’s film as “stunning,” and hailed the first appearance of Lecter as being “as dramatic as the unmasking of the Phantom of the Opera.”

That kind of praise rankled the film’s few detractors, including Gene Siskel, the Chicago Tribune critic who’d become one of the most prominent critics in the country, thanks to Siskel & Ebert, the TV show he cohosted with his on-screen antagonist, Roger Ebert. In his thumbs-down review, Siskel derided Hopkins’s performance, calling it “way overplayed,” and lamented Demme’s decision to make “a surprisingly trashy project.” The film, he argued, was nothing more than a “star-studded freak show”—one that lacked taste and insight: “I didn’t learn a thing about serial killers from this movie.” 

Ebert, for his part, was let down by the film’s ending but praised its dialogue and performances. “It worked for me! It worked!” he told Siskel. To which his partner replied tersely, “Well, then you’re easy.”

But even a widely trusted critic like Siskel wasn’t going to keep audiences away. The Silence of the Lambs opened at the box office at number one, where it would stay for more than a month. And while Foster was undeniably the film’s star attraction—she was profiled by Rolling Stone and The New York Times and appeared on TV chat shows worldwide—it was Hopkins’s turn as Lecter that turned the film into a cultural event. By the spring of 1991, the actor’s face would be staring back from the covers of both Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly (which declared him “the scariest man in movies”). 

Lecter didn’t have more than a few pages’ worth of dialogue in Tally’s script. But many of his bitchy put-downs and asides would become well-known catchphrases. Diane Baker, who played the desperate Senator Martin, would spend decades after the film’s release being approached by strangers eager to quote the most cutting line from her scene with Hopkins. “I was in Memorial Sloan Kettering visiting a patient, and there was a nurse pushing a gurney down the hallway with a patient on it, going into an operation,” Baker recalls. “She stops, sees me, and says, ‘Love your suit.’ I looked in horror at the patient. And then she moved on.”

[Fans] didn’t just want Lecter to survive; they wanted him to be free.

Hannibal Lecter had captured the public’s imagination—for better or for worse. One New York City psychologist told the press that nearly a third of her male patients wanted to talk about Lecter. ”They’ve lost three or four nights’ sleep after that movie,” she reported. And Lecter became a frequent topic of conversation at Manhattan power lunches, where high-priced attorneys spoke in trembling tones about watching The Silence of the Lambs. “These are people who work on deals worth millions of dollars and it doesn’t strike fear into their hearts,” noted a lawyer at a large New York City firm, “but for some reason, Hannibal Lecter did.”

One viewer who wasn’t rattled by the film was Harris’s mother, who caught The Silence of the Lambs at a theater in Memphis. Polly Harris told a reporter she was pleased with the movie, which she hadn’t found all that unnerving: “I’m not easily scared,” she said.

But she was the exception. Merciless lawyers, seen-it-all movie critics, hardened horror fans—they’d simply never met anybody like Lecter before. The most popular big-screen villains of the 1980s had been blank-masked maniacs and dream-dwelling killers, not to mention various vampires, aliens, ghosts, and gremlins. Lecter was more refined. Granted, he ate people—but he also seemed like a fascinating dining companion. And unlike the coarse killers who’d haunted audiences for the last decade, Lecter was insightful, quippy, and yearning for some sort of connection—all recognizably human traits.

In fact, at least one viewer felt as though he really had known Lecter. While watching The Silence of the Lambs in the theater, a former Associated Press employee, Tom Kelly, thought of a former coworker. “[Lecter] was so even-tempered, so almost removed from himself,” he said. “In some of those scenes, his dry wit made me turn to my wife and say, ‘That’s Tom Harris.’”

For most moviegoers, though, the only pop culture precedent for Lecter was Norman Bates, the tortured loner made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Psycho. In one of the film’s most ingenious scenes, Bates pushes a car containing a murder victim into a marsh—only to watch it get stuck. As he looks on nervously, hoping that the car will sink, it’s almost impossible not to root for him. From that point on, much of the audience is on the side of Norman Bates—even as he kills again.

But while moviegoers in 1960 rooted for Bates to get away with murder, they ultimately sighed in relief when he was locked up by the film’s end. Such a fate wouldn’t have satisfied the many fans of The Silence of the Lambs. They didn’t just want Lecter to survive; they wanted him to be free.

And now he was, having fled into popular culture. Throughout 1991, The Silence of the Lambs was inescapable, and so was its man-eating main attraction. All you had to do was turn on the TV. Not long after the movie’s release, Saturday Night Live aired a Lecter sketch starring Jeremy Irons, who had been on an early casting wish list for the Lecter role. On The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, guest host Jay Leno showed off a fake Hannibal Lecter cookbook, titled How to Eat Friends & Digest People. NBC even revived Michael Mann’s forgotten 1986 Lecter film Manhunter, airing the movie under the new title Red Dragon: The Curse of Hannibal Lecter and promoting it with a growling commercial voiceover: “Hannibal the Cannibal is coming to your house Friday night!”

Everybody wanted to get into business with Lecter. That spring, a merchandiser and part-time actor named Stanley DeSantis, who’d worked on such hot pop culture properties as The Simpsons and Spuds MacKenzie, pitched Orion several potential Lecter tie-in products: T-shirts, board games, a video game, even a 1-900 number. DeSantis believed that there were millions of dollars to be made from Lecter swag—provided, he said, that the items were “true to the film and its character, while remaining in good taste.” A deal was never struck, though it’s unclear if the merch ideas were nixed by studio executives, or by Harris.

A few months later, President George H. W. Bush invoked Lecter while giving a commencement address at the FBI Academy in Quantico. “On my way in, I may have spotted Hannibal the Cannibal in the audience,” he told the crowd. “For those parents and others, that’s an inside joke that I’m not sure I understand myself.”*

When Harris got word of the president’s remarks, he sent a joking fax to his agent, Mort Janklow: “Does he have to pay for our material?” The author had kept his pledge not to watch the film. When Harris and his partner, Pace Barnes, went to a Miami-area multiplex during the film’s release, she opted to see Demme’s movie, while he wandered into a different theater. According to the FBI’s John Douglas, Harris wouldn’t even sit through the movie’s trailer.

But the author was nonetheless pleased with how the film was being received. “Splendid!” Harris wrote in a fax to the filmmakers. “My dentist admitted he’d sneaked in free. I took six bucks out of his bill. Raves here, as everywhere. That’s some job, gentlemen.” Harris had plenty to be happy about: The paperback version of The Silence of the Lambs had shot to number one on the New York Times bestseller list after the film’s release—and his film rights deal promised him an extra $10,000 for each week it spent in the top spot.

That prompted another fax from Harris. “I have two reasons to celebrate: Your brilliant picture, and the new readership it has brought me,” he wrote to Demme from Miami. “All I needed was a really swell bottle of champagne.” Harris could afford entire crates of bubbly by then. There was plenty of money coming in thanks to The Silence of the Lambs. “He and Pace are having so much fun,” a friend said a few months after the film’s opening. “They just bought this crazy ’50s house with a pool, and he drives a big Jaguar.”

The response to The Silence of the Lambs also thrilled many within the FBI, particularly the women who’d been working in the Bureau for years, awaiting recognition and respect. With Starling, they had an on-screen hero—brainy, nervy, and averse to men’s bullshit—who could be claimed as one of their own. In a letter to the producers, FBI agent and Harris friend Athena Varounis noted: “The first time I went to see it, I was accompanied by a group of female Special Agents . . . you would not have found a more critical audience anywhere! In the end, after some intense discussion, you were voted ‘four and a half guns’ out of a possible five.” And when Mississippi-raised FBI agent Mary Ann Krauss—who’d met with Foster before production—caught the film, she was struck by how expertly it portrayed the nuts-and-bolts aspects of FBI fieldwork. But what really struck her was Foster’s twang. “I was like ‘Holy moly—was she recording me?’” Krauss says. “A southerner can pick up on an accent like that. And I felt like she did a good job.”

The raves for the film extended throughout the Bureau. “The FBI people are very pleased with the professional portrayal,” special agent Walter B. Stowe, Jr., wrote in a congratulatory letter sent to Demme during the film’s opening weekend. “It never hurts to see the organization we all care about and know to be good well-depicted on the big screen.”

Such a depiction was a public relations victory for the FBI. The Silence of the Lambs made working for the Bureau seem thrilling and purposeful. Shayne Buchwald was already interested in true crime and psychological thrillers when she watched the film with a bloody nose in that small Pennsylvania theater. But not long after that night, she realized that she wanted to join the Bureau and began researching serial killers and profiling. “Lecter fascinated me, but it was Clarice who really held my attention,” she says. “I admired how quick and clever she was, as well as how honest she was with him . . . she knew how to get what she needed.”

Buchwald joined the FBI Academy in 2002 and went on to spend more than two decades with the Bureau, with a focus on violent crime. At one point early on during her Bureau career, she was commuting regularly on a red-eye flight from California to Maryland. When crew members learned what she did for a living, they sometimes gave her a fitting nickname: “They’d say, ‘Clarice, do you want some more water?’” She rewatched The Silence of the Lambs every year, and after she retired from the Bureau in 2023, she had an image of the film’s death’s-head moth tattooed on her left arm.

No one at the FBI could have predicted the long-term effect that The Silence of the Lambs would have on the Bureau’s reputation. The film’s biggest beneficiary, however, was Hopkins. Suddenly he was one of the most recognizable actors in the world, not to mention a middle-aged sex symbol. Women approached the fifty-three-year-old star and shyly told him that he’d been in their dreams (sometimes as Lecter). And when he appeared on The Tonight Show—still sporting Lecter’s slicked-back hair—in March 1991, several audience members “oohed and aahed as if he were Mel Gibson,” according to a Newsweek account. As one of Hopkins’s admirers told a reporter after meeting the actor in person, “I cannot believe I’m attracted to Hannibal Lecter.”

A month into the long theatrical run of The Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins was a guest on The Mark & Brian Show, a popular Los Angeles radio program. The actor did a few impressions, including one of his idol and former neighbor Richard Burton—and answered questions from overheated listeners.

CALLER: I am shaking.

HOPKINS: What’s your name?

CALLER: My name’s Karen.

HOPKINS [AS LECTER]: Hi, Karen.

CALLER: It sends chills up my spine when you say, ‘Hello, Clarice.’ Would you say that for me?

HOPKINS [AS LECTER]: Hello, Clarice. I’ll help you catch him, Clarice. Hi, Clarice. Where do you live, Karen?

CALLER: You know, I hope there is a sequel, because I will be first in line to see it.

Just a few years before portraying Hannibal Lecter, Hopkins had all but given up on being a Hollywood movie star. Now he had the attention of the entire film industry. Not long after The Silence of the Lambs opened, he found himself cruising down LA’s Sunset Boulevard, an area known for its towering movie advertisements. “I always used to feel resentment at seeing someone else’s name up on the big billboards,” he said. But this time, he spotted a massive poster for The Silence of the Lambs, featuring the words anthony hopkins. “I just pulled over and looked at it. And it made me laugh. Did I feel any different? No, I feel exactly the same. I realize now it’s all a game, and next month, there’ll be someone else up there.”

But Hopkins wouldn’t be going away anytime soon—and neither would Lecter.

From Hannibal Lecter: A Life by Brian Raftery. Copyright © 2026 by Brian Raftery.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

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Brian Raftery’s work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Wired, GQ, and The Ringer. He’s the author of Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen, and the host of multiple podcasts for The Ringer, including the acclaimed Gene & Roger. He lives in Burbank, California, with his wife and daughters, and will never eat meat again.