Personification of sheer or pure evil is an aspect dealt with utmost care and caution even in the highest of the art forms. Director Jonathan Demme’s 1991 psychological thriller the Silence of The Lambs achieves the feat with utmost precision successfully and hence the film is a masterpiece of all times.

The film centers around a female FBI agent played by Jodie Foster working on a case about a serial killer, which brings her face to face with celebrated psychiatrist and a notorious mass murderer Dr. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter played with a delicious malice by Anthony Hopkins. Dr. Lecter is serving a life sentence for committing a number of gruesome murders and then eating up his victims. The savage potential in his apparently suave mannerisms truly makes the portrayal by Hopkins a rarity in the history of on screen performances.

There has been hardly another instance in cinema to construct such an intensely terrifying tale based on the beauty and the beast motif. Apart from that what really makes the film a contemporary classic is its subtle yet consistent tendency to construct a nightmare of every man’s deepest fear and secret dread. Starting from cannibalism, peeling off the skin, claustrophobia, the imagery and ambience of decomposition, entomophobia, manifestations of perverted sexuality, nyctophobia and secret stalking, the film ends up becoming almost a mirror reflecting the human soul standing naked. It is hardly a surprise that it walked away with all the four major Oscars.