(un)cultured vol.2
Scream (1996) and Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Welcome to the second installation of (un)cultured, the series where I will be watching for the fist time, and discussing iconic, genre defining films! This month I tackled some iconic horror films: Scream and Silence of the Lambs!
In case you have no idea what I am talking about, I did a full introductory post about this series that you can read here!
scream & silence of the lambs
I thought both of these films were surprisingly brilliant. I went into both completely blind and was genuinely taken aback by their creativity and the brilliance of the performances and cinematography—which is hilarious considering how iconic they are. I feel sort of like a teenage boy asking if you’ve ever heard of his favourite niche underground band… Nirvana.
Unlike with last month’s picks for (un)cultured, horror is a genre I don’t engage with much in film specifically, which means that in this series’ quest for understanding referential frameworks I don’t have anything modern to understand or see in a new light based off these films. Unless you count the fact that I now understand the show Criminal Minds to undeniably be an extension of Silence of the Lambs.
Instead, I thought it might be an interesting exercise for me to discuss what stuck out to me thematically in these films, from the point of view of my closest touchpoint to horror cinema: gothic literature.
I tend to over research my writing and opinions, and here have made a conscious effort not to, so I wonder what parts of this post will resonate with you, what parts of what I have to say align with popular opinions, and if anything I have to say strikes as completely off base.
In terms of horror sub-genres, these films occupy rather different spaces, but are united by their narrative and thematic preoccupation with violence and threats against women’s bodies. The difference being where Scream works with horror, Silence of the Lambs works with terror.
Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe’s differentiation of terror and horror, based off Burke’s ideas on the sublime, suggest that much like the sublime, terror hinges on obscurity. Terror is about the anticipation or the imagination of horror. Horror is then the sensation felt only after a tangible experience.
Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.1
As a slasher film, Scream is bloody and gory and violent. Characters are murdered though stabbings, shootings, decapitations, even electrocution via TV set. We are situated firmly within horror, and even the film’s distinctive, snarky meta commentary on the slasher genre compounds this.
The characters seem to be sporadically aware that they are in a horror film and are constantly referring to other films and tropes, using these as maps to navigate their current situation. As a narrative device, this compounds the horror and in fact attempts to undercut any sense of terror for the audience by flat out guaranteeing the impending violence (think, the scene where we learn the ‘rules’ of a slasher film).
Silence of the Lambs is a psychological crime thriller and while there are violent and truly scary moments, particularly in the final third of the film, the fear factor is almost entirely in the audience’s imagination. Specifically a woman’s imagination.
For example the scene where Clarice is trying to get into the storage unit Dr. Lecter has led her too. It is pitch black nighttime, Clarice is alone with a creepy looking man and his driver and she has to lay down to squeeze herself into the gap between the storage door and the floor. It is a scene that for any woman, is rife with the potential for sexual violence, thus inciting terror.
Often even when we see gory things in Silence of the Lambs, for example the bodies of the victims, we are still engaging in terror not horror. The bodies are framed as part of the detective narrative, not the murder narrative. They are shown clinically and to be observed for clues, not to incite fear in and of themselves. The terror is in what we as an audience are imagining has happened to these women, what the clues begin to reveal about Buffalo Bill’s motives and methods.
So, how does all this play into a Gothic narrative? The Gothic is characterised by the idea of transformation or coming of age; specifically the moral education of a young woman through terror, and less often, elements of horror.
Both films, Scream and Silence of the Lambs, feature a female protagonists: Sidney, a teenager attending Woodsboro High School, and Clarice, an young FBI trainee at Quantico. Both women on the surface slot fairly neatly into the archetype of a Gothic heroine, young, somewhat impressionable, not fully established in the world or society. But where these films subvert expectations, is that neither character still possess what is essential to a Gothic heroine: the naivety of youth.
Instead of undergoing a moral education, our protagonists undergo a re-education.
Sidney has essentially experienced an entire horror film’s worth of narrative before the movie even begins in the discovery of her mother’s body and the public trial where she testified against the man she believed to her mothers rapist and murderer.
She is a somber, grieving character who feels sorely out of place within the rest of the townsfolk; the student body who are ready to laugh at the gory nature of the murders, the campy news anchor Gale Weathers who will do anything to get the scoop, her horny boyfriend, even the bumbling deputy sheriff Dewey who seems to be more worried about his reputation in town as a macho man, than actually solving the murders.
They are in a slasher film, but Sidney is in a Gothic one.
I buried the lede a little here, but surprise, turns out Scream is also deeply, though less obviously, concerned with terror.
While unconventional, Sidney does undergo education through terror not in terms of the violence she witnesses, but in having to come to terms with knowledge that reveals the true evil nature of the world. She has to confront not only that the true murderer of her mother is her boyfriend, but also that she put an innocent man in prison, that her mother was an adulterer and not the woman she thought she was.
This B-Plot is what makes Scream feel dark and scary, where the meta narrative and the campy characters try to veer the film to a horror-comedy direction, Sidney’s grief and transformation roots the film in reality.
Silence of the Lambs is a slightly more traditional Gothic narrative. Our protagonist Clarice is able to come to terms with the evils of the world through confronting a man who is essentially the physical manifestation of all things evil and amoral.
Through her interactions with Dr. Lecter, she is able to realise how the trauma of losing her father has been the propulsive force in her life leading her to desire justice for innocent people above all else. In this way, she ends the film knowing herself better than when she started.
If both of these films can be understood through the framework of a Gothic narrative, then one must ask the question that any good Gothic novel asks: what here is really meant to be feared?
The answer for both of these films is men. As I suggested in the beginning of this piece, these are films concerned with violence and threats of violence against women’s bodies.
Women’s bodies are positioned as constantly being in danger in these films.
In Scream the fear factor lies less in who the murderer is and more in who is going to get murdered next. This is what makes the reveal at the end so scary and sinister.
These murders haven’t been the result of a psycho killer, but the calculated revenge fantasy of a deranged chauvinist.
At the end of the day the film is playing on the very real fear rooted in women’s lives that if violence is done unto a woman’s body, it is most likely to occur at the hands of someone she knows.2
In Silence of the Lambs the threat of men comes not only in the form of violence, but also incompetence, and deference to the patriarchy.
Silence of the Lambs is in many ways about the endurance of women and what it takes to operate as a woman within the patriarchy. It is both about the importance of femininity: Clarice noticing the woman’s glitter nail polish. And the price of femininity: Clarice having to endure disrespect, inappropriate flirting, the assault from Miggs, her femininity being used as a pawn against Dr. Lecter.
The camera alone does a lot of this storytelling: shots of strange men leering at Clarice juxtaposed against Clarice being surrounded by her peers, large imposing men, ignoring her and simultaneously making her uncomfortable.
Once again, the film is playing on the very real threat or consequence of being a woman in the patriarchy. While the dramatised violence of cannibalism and Buffalo Bill are scary, what is tangibly, relatably scary in this film, is the constant otherness of the female body and the inherent level of terror that comes with existing within one. 3
McKillop, Alan D. “Mrs. Radcliffe on the Supernatural in Poetry.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 31, no. 3 (1932): 352–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27703650.
https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/statistics-perpetrators-of-sexual-violence/
https://womensaid.org.uk/what-we-do/research/domestic-abuse-the-facts/#:~:text=Nearly%20a%20third%20of%20women,partner%20(ONS%2C%202025b).
https://vawnet.org/sc/scope-problem-intimate-partner-homicide-statistics
Talking about female bodies, I would be remiss not to mention the film’s the confused representation of transness. Buffalo Bill is branded a “transsexual” by the FBI, but not by Dr. Lecter, who suggests that Bill’s ‘transness’ is a coping mechanism or misunderstanding of his own trauma. With this, the film just gets away with not technically having a trans person as their Othered antagonist, but in general this representation is pretty definitively offensive and despite being muddled.