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 for Slate Plus members.

To hear every episode of Flashback and get ad-free versions of all Slate podcasts, you can sign up for Slate Plus now at Slate.com slash Flashback.

It's only $35 for the first year. That's Slate.com slash Flashback, Slate's podcast about older and classic movies.

This time we're going to be talking about Jonathan Demme's 1991 Mega Smash,-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. And 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. Wow.

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.

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 past 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.

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