Lexi Ames: “Oh my goodness, yes. As a big horror film fan and true-crime junky myself, I can’t help but be riveted by a story about someone like Ed Gein or Jeffrey Dahmer that involves collecting bones in early life. Obviously, there is something greatly different in the motivations of serial killers versus that of your local taxidermist or anatomy enthusiast, but what is it, exactly? I think it becomes very difficult to see the difference and draw the line of distinction if you are someone who isn’t compelled by anatomy. If someone hasn’t grown up going to natural history museums frequently, their only lens of taxidermy may be through the horror genre. For me, interacting with anatomy is like interacting with a great art form, and I think we are typically trained as a society to see it as the exact opposite of that.
I really racked my brain to think of ‘nice’ taxidermists in film or television, and had a difficult time drumming up any! The closest I could come was Vanessa Ives in the series Penny Dreadful (2014–2016). Of course, every character in this show is meant to be inherently creepy, but Vanessa is a particularly strong and curious person, and even with her dark sides she is impossible not to admire. In a rare scene that depicts Vanessa as happy and contented, she is shown dabbling with taxidermy as a young child. Although her prodigiousness in the craft is completely unbelievable (she’s like a ten-year-old nineteenth-century Martha Stewart of death!), it’s charming to see her and her young friends explore the natural world through the art before everything in their lives is swallowed by betrayal and darkness. Overall though, it’s clearly entertaining to be creeped out by a character who curates the dead. I can’t imagine that trope disappearing, especially as there are too many real-world examples in public memory, but perhaps it can expand into normalcy in other genres. It would be great to see taxidermists and death workers portrayed in entertainment that are just plain boring and unremarkable.”
Kelly: “Or without the stereotype of a morgue worker eating over the dead bodies!”
Thanks to Lexi Ames, we learned so much about taxidermy, specimen collection, and the intersection of science and art which feels apropos for a book about the science in film. We don’t think we’ll ever look at roadkill the same after our enlightening interview!
CHAPTER SIX
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Year of Release: 1991
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writer: Ted Tally
Starring: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins
Budget: $19 million
Box Office: $272.7 million
There are two monsters in the acclaimed, Academy Award–winning movie The Silence of the Lambs (1991). If we were to use the serial killer classifications laid out by Holmes and Holmes on these fabricated killers, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) would fall into similar categories. Both men are compelled to kill for a product. Lecter eats the bodies of his victims, and as he’s a class act, he serves them up with the famous “fava beans and a nice chianti!” While Buffalo Bill, far less sophisticated, kills women of a larger girth in order to inhabit their skin. This, of course, evokes the anti-hero of this section, Ed Gein, who shared in precisely the same practice. Gein purposely chose larger women. Both Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden were known to be plus-size, as are Buffalo Bill’s markedly younger victims. Surrounded by the bones, organs, and skin of his victims and those he grave robbed, Ed Gein engaged in any number of horrific acts. It’s easy to let our macabre imaginations run wild. Yet, there is one misnomer that has been perpetuated since his capture: there is no proof that Ed Gein was ever a cannibal. Because of their fixation on female skin, Buffalo Bill and Ed Gein are inexorably linked. Any link between Gein and the well-educated and poised Hannibal Lecter would be a tenuous one. In fact, it was another true monster who resulted in the creation of the notorious Dr. Lecter.
Before he was a famous author, Thomas Harris was a journalist for Argosy magazine. In his early twenties, he was tasked with interviewing Dykes Askew Simmons, a murderer on death row in Mexico. During Harris’s visit to Nuevo León State Prison, he also spoke with the prison’s doctor regarding an injury Simmons had suffered while incarcerated. This exchange with the physician struck Harris as intriguing, especially when the doctor brought up rather philosophical musings about “the nature of torment.”1 When Harris finished up his interview, he asked the warden how long the doctor had been employed by the prison. The Warden informed the young journalist that the doctor was a murderer, sharing the same fate as his patient, as he was also on death row. This man, who Harris has not named publicly, but is widely believed to be Dr. Alfredo Balli Trevino, had been convicted of the murder of his lover, Jesús Castillo Rangel. According to The Sun, in October of 1959 Balli Trevino slit his boyfriend “Rangel’s throat with a scalpel in a crime of passion before finishing him off in the bathroom. Balli Trevino cut the body into pieces and buried them to hide the grim crime.”2 This poised man of science, who Harris would later describe as having “a certain elegance about him” had been the perpetrator of a brutal crime. It was this dichotomy, not unlike the good versus bad conundrum of Norman Bates, which Harris drew from when writing Red Dragon (1981). Balli Trevino served twenty years before his sentence was commuted in 1981. He spent the rest of his life, until his death in 2009, serving the poor in Monterrey, Mexico. Ironically, the man who inspired Harris to create Hannibal Lecter was known in his community for his large heart, and for not charging the sick and elderly for his medical expertise.
Harris’s novel Red Dragon, containing the first iteration of Dr. Lecter, was a successful novel that spawned a less successful film; Manhunter (1986). While Manhunter underperformed at the box office, this did not dissuade Orion Pictures from capitalizing on the wildly popular novel sequel The Silence of the Lambs (1988). Orion’s gamble paid off, the film released on Valentine’s Day 1991 to both critical acclaim and a solid box office showing.
While Dr. Lecter and Buffalo Bill represent the darker side or the “Mr. Hyde” of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is the film’s reasonable, empathetic “Dr. Jekyll.” Foster’s performance as a newbie FBI agent on her first, crucial assignment rivals that of Hopkins’s. She won an Academy Award for her efforts, and to this day Starling stands out as one of the more well-liked and memorable horror movie protagonists. She is bold enough to challenge Lecter with his greatest weapon, his intelligence, when she says “you see a lot, Doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don’t you—why don’t you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you’re afraid to.” It is her back and forth with Lecter, their oddly dynamic dance of wits, that catapults this movie into so many “best of” lists, horror or otherwise. The American Film Institute has consistently showered The Silence of the Lambs with accolades, including #65 in the best movies of all time, and Hannibal Lecter nabbed the top spot as the #1 villain in AFI’s 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.