Silence of the Lambs, The | Blu-ray

Jonathan Demme’s best known directorial work came at a moment when serial killer fascination in America was peaking. Advances in police tactics, forensic science, evidence collection and communication brought with them a hunger to understand the most remote and unfathomable criminal psyches.

Unlike popular panics against satanists, beatniks, hippies, and druggies, this wasn’t a craze born of imagined crimes or counter-culture fears, instead it was a slow revelation that monsters had gone unchecked among us for decades due to technological limitations and general incompetence.

Michael Mann tackled Thomas Harris’ serial killer/profiling detective series several years earlier with the stunningly stylish Manhunter, but Demme’s work has become the fundamental text not just in bringing Hannibal Lecter to the screen, but in mythologising these criminals on film. Silence of the Lambs creates such a compelling portrait of the psychopath and the cat & mouse in catching them that practically all TV and film focused on serial killers—whether fact or fiction—operates from the framework Demme established.

Special Features (via criterion.com)

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director of photography Tak Fujimoto, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• Audio commentary from 1994 featuring director Jonathan Demme, actors Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, screenwriter Ted Tally, and former FBI agent John Douglas
• New interview with critic Maitland McDonagh
• Thirty-eight minutes of deleted scenes
• Four documentaries featuring hours of interviews with cast and crew
• Behind-the-scenes featurette
• Storyboards
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An introduction by Foster, an essay by critic Amy Taubin, pieces from 2000 and 2013 by author Thomas Harris on the origins of the character Hannibal Lecter, and a 1991 interview with Demme