The Silence of the Lambs is one of the great thrillers in Hollywood history. Based on the novel by Thomas Harris, Jonathan Demme’s horror procedural reinvented the serial murderer narrative with a gothic edge, a pioneering heroine, and one of the great villains in the form of Hannibal Lecter. It remains a rare horror film to have won the Best Picture Oscar, and the figure of Hannibal the Cannibal continues to loom over the genre over 30 years later. A sequel was inevitable, and the one we got was odd, but it was nowhere near as strange as the book it was based on.
Harris reportedly never wanted to write a sequel, but when mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis, who owned the film rights to the Lecter character but didn't work on The Silence of the Lambs, wanted a sequel, Harris provided one. The end result, which ended up being the second biggest selling novel of 1999 (beaten only by John Grisham), is genuinely bananas.
