‘LAMBS’ SCREENING
Soldiers & Sailors to show ‘Silence’ on film’s 30th anniversary
It’s somehow been 30 years since movie audiences met Clarice Starling, Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill. “The Silence of the Lambs” came out on Feb. 14, 1991, and quickly proved to be both a commercial success and critical darling. It was that year’s fourth-highest-grossing movie and earned seven nominations and five wins at the 64th Academy Awards. The film was mostly shot in Western Pennsylvania, and its cultural ubiquity was an early feather in the cap for the region’s burgeoning film industry.
Fans who want to commemorate 30 years of “The Silence of the Lambs” can do so Friday at Oakland’s Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum, the set for scenes in which Lecter escapes his barred cage. It will be the first time the hall will hold a public screening of director Jonathan Demme’s horror-thriller.
Tickets are $10 each at www.soldiersandsailorshall.org. Masks will be required to be worn at all times while inside Soldiers & Sailors, and the venue will only be allowing about 400 guests into its auditorium that seats about 2,300 to help maintain social distancing, according to Soldiers & Sailors president and CEO John McCabe.
“It’s very exciting for us, and we’re grateful that things are somewhat back to normal that we’re able to at least invite in a handful of the public,” McCabe told the Post-Gazette. “Hopefully, it’s a success, and next year we can open it up to everyone.”
Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the screening will start at 7 p.m. The evening will also include a replica of Lecter’s cage created by Hundreds Acre Manor, along with a slew of vendors prior to the movie. One of those will be Buffalo Bill’s House, a Perryopolis residence that the film used as the home of Jame Gumb — aka serial killer Buffalo Bill — which in September opened for overnight stays.
The 2,400-square-foot house and 2 acres of surrounding property were purchased about a year ago for just under $300,000 by Chris Rowan, a 39year-old art director and prop stylist who lives in New Jersey. He’ll be at Soldiers & Sailors Friday alongside his venture’s booth that will feature a life-size Buffalo Bill replica.
As a horror buff who first saw “The Silence of the Lambs” when he was 11, Rowan isn’t
surprised that the film is still so beloved and revered.
“‘Silence’ has really stood the tests of time,” he said. “It has remained a very important piece of pop culture in my eyes. You constantly hear famous movie quotes. ... These lines are iconic, and 30 years later there are still Buffalo Bill, Clarice, Hannibal and even Precious the dog references. It’s just as important today as it was in 1991.”
After first reading about the house in October 2020, Rowan purchased it to “create a hybrid of a beautifully classic, aesthetically Victorian Gothic home” that fans could spend a night exploring. Now parties of up to eight people can hold sleepovers at Rowan’s newly open “cinematic destination.”
This particular Fayette County house has been around since 1910, according to Rowan. Now, it’s a tricked-out monument to “The Silence of the Lambs” that includes everything from a 6- foot Hannibal Lecter animatronic that delivers lines from the movie to a basement “workshop of horrors” that resembles where Buffalo Bill did his sewing in the film to an upstairs loft Rowan calls “Buffalo Bill’s Playhouse” that’s decked out with 1970s and ’80s-style games and movies.
If all goes well, Buffalo Bill’s House will in 2022 start offering guided tours, opportunities for other movies or TV shows to film there, and may put on its own screening of “The Silence of the Lambs.” For now though, Rowan is looking forward to Friday’s screening in Oakland.
“The cage sequence is really a phenomenal sequence. Being able to be in the iconic Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall with the cage, it’s just going to be fantastic and I’m super jazzed to see ‘Silence of the Lambs’ on the big screen in the location it was filmed.”
So is McCabe, who said that Soldiers & Sailors has been hosting screenings for University of Pittsburgh freshmen for the past six years as a way to teach them about the building’s bigscreen lineage. He said that licensing issues prevented Soldiers & Sailors from showing “The Silence of the Lambs” to the public sooner.
McCabe is a former Army major who recalled getting a phone call from his wife while he was overseas. She and McCabe’s sister were screaming in the theater while watching “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1991. To this day, Soldiers & Sailors is still a hot spot for “Silence”-related pilgrimages, like the couple 10-plus years ago who McCabe said got married there and made a point to serve fava beans and Chianti to their guests, a nod to a famous line from the film.
It’s taken a lot to get Soldiers & Sailors to the point during the COVID-19 pandemic where it could even contemplate throwing an event like this, and McCabe would love to see “Lambs” fans there Friday.
“It’s been tough,” he said. “We have been successful in certain areas. A lot of new initiatives and thinking outside the box, a lot of hard work by the staff and a lot of stress. ... We’re hoping that everyone responds to this new avenue of sharing this unique history by coming down to see the movie.”