In his novel Red Dragon Thomas Harris first introduces the character Hannibal Lecter as part of a larger criminal subculture stretching just beneath the veneer of our everyday life. The horror is in tracing an FBI agent's pursuit of a serial killer armed with an uncanny skill for avoiding detection. As but one sideshow to the novel's whodunit structure Lecter appears as a crazed and methodical perversion motivated by pleasures and pains wholly unknowable yet useful in pursuing other criminals.

Red Dragon was adapted for the screen and renamed Manhunter by writer-director Michael Mann with William Petersen starring as FBI agent Will Graham. Lecter was faithfully included as an interesting sideshow and in his portrait of the killer shrink Brian Cox does a memorable job giving life to someone neither sane nor insane but definitely out of this world.

Resuming his page-turning success with the follow up novel The Silence of the Lambs, Harris turned more directly to Lecter making him one of four primary characters in another thriller. This time the crime specialist is an FBI trainee named Clarice Starling and her prey is the sexually ambiguous killer dubbed Buffalo Bill. Apparently the composite of three real life serial killers, Bill skins his victims like Ed Gein, baits them into a van like Ted Bundy and keeps them in a pit in his basement like Gary Heidnick. Into this sordid world Lecter is re-introduced from his prison cell to help Starling because he was once Bill's therapist. To one side of the investigation Starling's mentor, Jack Crawford, uses her to manipulate Lecter even as the good doctor works to gain his freedom.

Quickly adapted for the screen by Ted Tally and directed by Jonathan Demme, the film The Silence of the Lambs was a come from nowhere smash that hit the prevailing zeitgeist square on the head. Casting the refined and impressive Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and newly minted Oscar winner Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, the filmmakers made an anti-hero and heroine combination for the times, much to the shock of critics and fans alike, both of whom were forced to acknowledge the appeal of serial killers and their pursuers.

At once highly educated, erudite, curious, even polite, Lecter is a medical doctor and gourmand of unusual taste. His trouble is in having accepted cannibalism as a justifiable practice that logically entails murdering his would-be meals.

Clarice is Lecter's opposite although with a similar control and training but with nearly scandalous heritage in having ascended from the worst kind of trailer trash to the pinnacle of American law enforcement. Giving herself over to the role with a kind of vulnerability that proved extraordinary, Foster's Starling is every bit as innocently capable as Hopkins's Lecter is cruelly calculating.

Together their duo created some of the most memorable on-screen tension and nascent eroticism of 1991. Not without notice the idea of their coupling was a forbidden fruit of the highest order although it was suggested in the original novel and then made complete in the follow up book and movie Hannibal.

Interestingly, Gene Hackman was first offered Lecter and Michelle Pfeiffer was asked to play Starling. Needless to say, both passed on the project allowing for the Hopkins-Foster combination as Lecter and Starling that blurred the boundary between conventional norms of sanity and insanity, goodness and evil, knowledge and ignorance. Plus their movie vehicle remained a faithful novel adaptation with only the most necessary minimization of the supporting part, including the novel's more prominent Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), and a slightly reduced pursuit of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine).

What remains most jarring about Demme's movie, though, is the way its point-of-view is frequently made to directly address and assault the audience. Using the usual establishing shots and crosscutting details cinematographer Tak Fujimoto gazes straight into the face of his cast. Thus the Buffalo Bill investigation is about us as much as its about a skin chasing serial killer because the movie's actors and actresses stare into the movie screen and out of our TV sets making us part of what happens instead of leaving us to the safety of our seats.

This choice to use select moments of direct address is in contrast to typical Hollywood style. Breaking the usual practice of working to erase any markers of their ever having been a camera crew present to record cast members working in artificial circumstances to produce our entertainment, The Silence of the Lambs experiments with film form.

The typical effects of a seamless storytelling convention that gives us the feel of mastering a movie's setting is ignored repeatedly in Demme's movie. When cast members gazing into the camera and, hence, gaze at us, the tropes of filmmaking are reversed. Strangely enough this reversal isn't particularly noticeable except that the film's already eerie subject and characters are given the added push of off-kilter filmmaking techniques.

An additional result of this break in form is that Demme's movie has a documentary-like feel. Starling's investigation is all the more unsettling because it is filmed like a public television show about cosmetic surgery rather than as a deeply disturbing story about human cruelty and terrible, aberrant behavior.

Producers Ronald M. Bozman, Edward Saxon and Kenneth Utt undoubtedly felt their investment was a sound one when they optioned Harris's book and put the project into production. From all considerations it was a terrific investment on their $22 million production since the picture went on to earn some $130 million at the domestic box office and an additional $142 million internationally.

With its commercial success assured the film also became only the third film in Academy Awards history to win the so-called top five awards of Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay. Following in the footsteps of It Happened One Night in 1934 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975, The Silence of the Lambs was that rare bird to capture critical rapture and popular support.

Because it was released in March 1991 its initial run was many months separated from the exhibition cycle of its Best Picture competitors since all four were released for the Christmas boom. Among them Barbra Streisand's self-centered version of Pat Conroy's novel The Prince of Tides may very well have been the popular favorite. Still, there was considerable support for Oliver Stone's three-hour long conspiracy investigation, JFK, and for Barry Levinson's Rain Man follow-up, the biopic Bugsy. Filling out the five nominees was Disney's animated fable Beauty and the Beast sounding the triumphant return of the animation studio to its position of dominance with the first ever Best Picture nominated feature cartoon.

Despite early acclaim and commercial success The Silence of the Lambs was not the shoe-in victor by any stretch of the imagination. That it swept the top five awards, though, was something hindsight has made out to be somehow obvious and imminent. At the 1992 Academy Awards ceremony, however, its installation as a new American movie classic was unexpected.

Likely its presence in the minds of moviegoers and Academy voters was helped by its release to cable television and video retail outlets before the Oscars ceremony was even broadcast. This reach stemmed, of course, from its early release date but also pointed out its staying power through capturing the popular imagination. Its subject matter, lineage in Harris's best selling novel and box office record meant it was a legitimate contender for awards and critical acceptance.

In remembering 1991 and The Silence of the Lambs as the year's Best Picture, it seems incredible that Thelma and Louise, La Femme Nikita and City of Hope weren't at least mentioned as competitors for top honors. Though it's unlikely any of them would have fared any better than The Prince of Tides, JFK, Bugsy or Beauty and the Beast, each of them is as interesting and remarkable a film as the four non-winners of the year.

As the now legendary woman buddy picture Thelma and Louise holds up with two totally convincing lead performances that trace a unique journey through personal freedom and social containment. In somewhat dissonant fashion Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, about a drugged-out-street-urchin-murderess turned highly trained assassin, introduced world audiences to a new style of screen action that has since become Hollywood's standard.

Finally it was John Sayles's densely produced City of Hope, partially made in response to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, that gave the year its most unflinching vision of a rotting America. Although its multiple narrative strands concerned with cross cultural interdependence was, in every way, a thought provoking and impressive story, it was an independent production and reached but a very small viewing public.

So then, the lessons learned in 1991 include the possibility of a horror movie being named picture of the year even when released nine month before its competition with off-center stars and a script filled with unabashedly despicable situations. All it needs is technical excellence, a bit of luck and a cultural vacuum ready to suck in all that's offered in slightly less than two hours of screened entertainment.