How ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ Inspired a Legion of Onscreen Copycats

In 2002’s Adaptation, one of the great works of film-as-criticism, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nic Cage, standing in for the real-life writer and filmmaker) excoriates his brother Donald (also Cage) for his cliché-ridden script. “The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personality,” he explains. “On top of that, you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See: every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.” A stung Donald replies that their mother called it “psychologically taut,” but the truth is that Charlie had him dead to rights.

Crime cinema has long been preoccupied with the Freud-lite insight that a razor-thin line separates the two sides of the law, and those tropes have only been more strictly codified in the years since The Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme’s immaculate, Oscar-lavished treatment of the Thomas Harris mass market paperback came to U.S. theaters 30 years ago today, and found a winning formula in the dynamic between the indefatigable Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and the urbane people-eater Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). Forcing the good guy to collaborate with the bad guy in order to apprehend the really bad guy allowed Lecter to get under Clarice’s skin while showing the seductive kernel of empathy at the center of his dense evil. The accessible yet sturdy pop-psych subtext, Demme’s proficiency in staging the high-wire action sequences, a pair of captivating lead performances, and a dash of deviant-sex exploitation made the film a landmark commercial and critical hit — and inadvertently inspired generations of copycats. (Not in real life, luckily. Mostly.)

Hollywood had already gone to the Harris well once before Silence of the Lambs, with Michael Mann’s little-seen, now enthusiastically re-appraised Manhunter in 1986. Even after Demme proved that there was gold in them thar blood-spattered hills, however, the campaign to capitalize on its popularity was anything but a rush. In a sign of how much the industry has changed since the ‘90s, the reluctance of the original talent to reunite for a sequel delayed the franchise until ten years later, with Hannibal in 2001. (If this were today, they’d have a trilogy locked down and confirmed before Lambs‘ opening weekend, Demme or no.) Hopkins reprised the role then, and again the next year for the prequel Red Dragon, bowing out for 2007’s regrettable reboot-before-we-used-that-term Hannibal Rising. The 2010s saw the interest in Harris’ characters eclipsing interest in Hopkins himself, as the cult favorite TV series Hannibal carved out a space for its sui generis brand of baroque homoeroticism between Lecter (an urbane Mads Mikkelsen) and investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy).

Last week saw the small-screen premiere of the new series Clarice, a test of whether viewers will still latch on to this IP even if licensing issues legally prohibit Lecter from rearing his fearsome head. In featuring a recast-yet-again Clarice as she hunts predators post-Lambs, the show takes a more direct approach to continuing the legacy of the creative property, which the rip-offs must necessarily come at from an angle.

That means you, The Blacklist, for which arch, manipulative villainous mastermind James Spader should have to send royalty checks back to Hopkins on a monthly basis. Or you, Prodigal Son, which adds a familial wrinkle to the usual uncomfortable team-up by pairing our NYPD protagonist with his mass-murderer dad (Michael Sheen, letting himself have a bit more fun with this than most) to catch the crook of the week. Even the Archie Comics mega-soap Riverdale, that reliable bellwether of what Gen Z is into, suggests an enduring fascination with the subject matter in its unshy parodizing. Last week’s episode, for instance, saw a sweatshirted Betty introduced on a jog through the same neck of the woods Clarice once used for her runs.

A cavalcade of films featuring determined FBI agents, charismatic serial killers, and abnormal-psych profilers have also hinged on the ambivalent tension between the hunter and the strange bedfellow they find difficult to resist. Like Die Hard, Lambs provided a template within which any number of variables could be tinkered with in an effort to hook audiences. 1998’s Fallen cast Denzel Washington as a Philly policeman framed for a string of murders by a devil capable of possessing bodies, a more literal form of Lecter’s psycho-parasitism. 2002’s Blood Work hit a lot of the same beats, albeit with the distinguishing factor of Clint Eastwood both directing and starring as the special agent sniffing out the “Code Murderer” hiding right under his nose.

By 2004, this routine had all but turned into a caricature of itself, as in the overly twisty Taking Lives. Angelina Jolie is the Clarice stand-in; Ethan Hawke is her lover, who also turns out to be the homicidal maniac with a penchant for assuming his victims’ identities. The grand finale, in which our gal uses a prosthetic pregnancy belly to get the drop on her nemesis, breaks its own self-serious act like Jimmy Fallon giggling through an SNL sketch. Even as these films started to precipitously decline in quality, they got by on the ready-made drama of their schematic, in which the relatable audience surrogate cannot deny a certain attraction to the forbidden. The magnetism of Lecter and his many offspring lured viewers into desire (if not sexual, then for the antagonist to get away with their crimes) against better judgement, like the buttoned-up procedural superego to the erotic thriller’s naked id.

More intriguing still is Tarsem Singh’s underrated 2001 head trip The Cell, which used the automatic green light afforded Lambs clones to service his wildest auteurist whims. In a 2008 interview, Singh confessed that “the serial-killer thing didn’t interest me at all.” As he explained, “at the turn of the century, a studio would make any film that had a serial killer in it. I just said, ‘Okay, so that’s the nutshell I need to put it in? It’s fine.'” He had devised a workable Trojan Horse in which he could smuggle “all this shit which was called overindulgent, masturbating on dead bodies or whatever,” a critically excoriated but stylistically astonishing assault of fantastical imagery. Best of all, his genuflecting to trends worked, racking up a $104 million payday for an oblique, surreal work of BDSM-inflected horror from the deepest recesses of a Barkeresque subconscious.

At the height of her movie-star bankability, Jennifer Lopez assumed the Clarice role as a psychologist pioneering technology that enables her to enter the dormant mind of a coma patient and coax them awake. The feds capture a sicko who likes to suspend himself over his captive prey by hooking chains into the skin on his own back; only trouble is, he’s gone vegetative before they could get the location of his most recent target, still trapped in a glass cube gradually filling with water. J-Lo must venture into the nasty thicket of his dreams, where all aesthetic rules of sense and logic melt away to make room for a maximalism untethered to reality. Singh held nothing back, drawing more influence from painters than fellow filmmakers in his vision of a nightmarish labyrinth of tunnels to nowhere and gravity reversals. For all the horned abominations and fetishistic dentistry and bathtubs filled with blood, the most memorable scene sends Lopez into a nondescript chamber containing a horse, which is then vertically chopped by sharp glass panels and separated into individual slices. This scene serves no purpose other than to convey Singh’s appreciation for the work of Damien Hirst.

In a best-case scenario like the one Singh contrived for himself, the long shadow cast by Demme’s masterpiece can provide cover for artists looking do their own thing. But with each reiteration of these same themes and devices, a greater stroke of inventiveness will be required to renew their fading potency. There are only so many gruesome methods of mutilating the human body, and only so many emotional subtexts in which to ground them, until this narrative vein completely runs dry. The reason Silence of the Lambs has never been outdone is that its genius never laid in the contours of its plot, but rather in an excellence not so easily imitated. You can’t just bottle the erudite menace of Anthony Hopkins, or the steely resolve of Jodie Foster, or the confident expertise of Jonathan Demme. A director tackling a project in this lineage has to be motivated by the same drive that makes Hannibal Lecter eat people; not because they have to, but for love of the game.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Where to stream The Silence Of The Lambs