![]() ![]() You crept into a sticky-floored cinema after midnight to watch gore-fests such as Friday the 13th, Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with other people who shared your sickness. Jonathan Demme’s thriller brought multiple murder into the movie mainstream.īefore Lambs, films portraying psychopathic killers tended to be cheap and nasty. The Silence of the Lambs broke box office records and scooped five Oscars. And in 1991, people queued around the block to watch Lecter play psychological chess with Clarice Starling. During the Victorian era, travel agents laid on day trips to public hangings. Romans piled into the Colosseum to watch gladiators fight to the death. “It’s a pretty effective picture, so it still rocks people some. He is convinced the film has lost its power to shock. Since then, we have become consistently less sensitised, generation by generation.” Back in 1991, Saxon would sneak into cinemas in Los Angeles to watch audiences’ reactions. “In the silent-movie era, when The Great Train Robbery came out, people would duck when they saw the train coming. Yes! Of course we have become more desensitised,” says Ed Saxon, one of the producers who worked on The Silence of the Lambs. Is it we who have changed? Have we become desensitised to serial killers chewing off the faces of their victims? Has a diet of blood and gore over the past 26 years girded up our loins to face the likes of Hannibal the Cannibal? Still Jodie Foster playing Clarice Starling, the gutsy and resourceful rookie FBI agent sent in to winkle out clues about psychopath Buffalo Bill from that connoisseur of evil, Dr Lecter. As yet, no one has turned up to man the moral barricades. The Silence of the Lambs shocked and thrilled audiences in 1991, but, for its rerelease in UK cinemas next month, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has downgraded its rating from 18 to 15. Two years later, ITV’s decision to broadcast a watered-down version – minus the gory bits – caused such a flutter of moral panic that it generated newspaper headlines. In New York, a psychologist claimed that a third of her patients wanted to talk about Hannibal Lecter. Cinemagoers were reported to be puking in the aisles. It gave one couple the heebie-jeebies so badly that they refused to budge unless the manager escorted them to the car park. Twenty-six years ago, The Silence of the Lambs was scaring people silly at the cinema. ![]()
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