When you want to enter the minds of perverse killers and sadists, look no further than Jonathan Demme’s 1991 masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs. A taut thriller teetering between psychological study and all-out horror; it is one of only three films to win the Big Five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is assigned to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), the brilliant yet violent psychopath sentenced to life imprisonment for various acts of murder and cannibalism, in the hopes he’ll offer insight into the mind of Buffalo Bill, a vicious murderer who skins his female victims. But while Hannibal the Cannibal does know something of Bill, he turns the interview on its head as he probes Clarice’s mind, conjuring the demons of her past. To say the lead performances are an achievement in acting is a gross understatement, especially when Hopkins received his Oscar for only fifteen minutes of screen-time in a two-hour long feature. Grisly images, unflinching horror, and the screaming of lambs are just the surface of this portrayal of Evil in its purest form.