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Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic.

What you're about to hear is a teaser for an episode of Flashback, my new movies podcast

with Vanity Fair's K. Austin Collins. Every two weeks, we're going to be digging into the archives

and chatting about some of our favorite older movies. But these episodes are only available in full

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That's Slate.com slash Flashback.

Thanks for listening. Hello and welcome to another episode of Flashback Slate's podcast about older and classic movies.

This time we're going to be talking about Jonathan

Demi's 1991 Mega Smash, five-time Academy Award winner, Silence of the Lambs, which was the

suggestion of my co-host, K. Austin Collins from Vanity Fair. Hey, Cam. Hi, how's it going? Pretty good,

except that you made me watch Silence of the Lambs twice for the first time in, I don't know, possibly since it came out. I'm not sure. Wow. I mean, I'm pretty easily scared by certain things and this movie has a lot of them. Like dead body stuff always scares me a lot. And this movie has some pretty gross autopsies and stuff like that. I'm sure I've re-seen bits of it in the years since. But I believe that my two times seeing this movie prior to this week were both in 1991 in the theater. I hadn't realized this, but it played for nine months in the theater. I mean, that's how big of a hit it was. It opened on Valentine's Day, which is there's something very devilish and sly about that opening a movie like this on on Valentine's Day to send people on a date, which is how I saw it. I don't think it was opening day, but I'm sure it was opening week. And I think I went back to that theater again to see it the same year because it was just an endless, endless rotation and was a giant hit. And I am not sure that I have willingly revisited it since just because, well, for one thing, it's totally graven in my mind, and we can talk

about that, the way that, you know, this movie has become such a passed around cultural objects, so quoted, so imitated, you know, that you almost don't need to see it again to quote many of the lines by heart. Right. But yeah, thank you for making me go back and revisit it, not just as a freaky thing to go experience in the theater, but as something to analyze and take apart. Because, of course, when I saw it, I was not a critic and was not really watching it with an analytical eye. I was just, you know, looking to be scared to death. Wow. You know, part of the reason I chose this was because this feels like a movie that everyone has seen. Like, I mean, we're still sort of in a nod to the upcoming Oscars.

Our last movie was Kramer versus Kramer, a best picture winner.

And I chose this because it is one of the, first of all, one of the rare best picture

winners to do the sweep of picture, director, actor, actress, and writing.

I think only it happened one night and what is the

other film that's doing. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That's right. It's a very elite category. It's a very early category. And then 1991. And it hasn't happened since. But also what you just said about it being in theaters for so long and the fact that it came out in February. For example, the wisdom right now is that if you want to have a film be competitive for

Oscars, they come out later in the year because voters won't remember a movie like this because it comes out in February. And Get Out was the recent example of that, a film from early in the year that was able to stay alive in the conversation past multiple festivals that it didn't go to and still get a healthy number of, you know, Oscar nominations. It's sort of not the way things happen now. Generally, I feel like... Well, us, Jordan Peel's second movie, that precisely did not happen for, right? It came out early in the year and was neglected and forgotten by most voting bodies at the end of the year. Well, it would have been great if Get Out because it was nominated for Best Picture.

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