The scariest movie Anthony Hopkins has ever seen: “I was knocked out by it”
After decades of working as an actor on stage and screen, Anthony Hopkins truly broke into the Hollywood mainstream with his role in The Silence of the Lambs as the iconic villain Hannibal Lecter. He’d already appeared in successful British films and even earned acclaim for his performance in David Lynch’s second feature, The Elephant Man, but his role as the terrifying cannibal exposed him to his widest audience yet.
Hannibal Lecter is one of cinema’s smartest and cunning villains, both charming and unnerving. He meets Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, a trainee FBI agent, so that she can study him in the hopes of catching another criminal with a taste for human flesh, but events descend into electrifying chaos. The movie, directed by Jonathan Demme, earned significant praise when it was released in 1991, with Hopkins winning a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for his incredible performance.
Decades later, Hopkins is still earning praise for his diverse career, starring in everything from religious epics to children’s movies. The actor isn’t scared to play challenging roles, even if that means stepping into the shoes of a famous figure and doing his best to embody him. This was the case when he accepted the role of Alfred Hitchcock for the film Hitchcock, a biopic that saw him act alongside Helen Mirren as his wife, Alma Reville.
The filmmaker changed cinema forever with his suspenseful and thrilling tales, beginning his career in the silent era. Hitchcock eventually went on to make some of the most acclaimed and influential movies of all time, including one that Hopkins called “the most terrifying film I’d ever seen,” when recalling his first time watching it.
Of course, Hopkins is referring to Hitchcock’s groundbreaking horror film Psycho. The movie was released in 1960, long before graphic and gory horror was the norm. Thus, people were truly disturbed by what they were seeing on screen. The scene in which Janet Leigh’s character, Marion, is stabbed in the shower shocked audiences worldwide because – despite the censorial Hays Code – we see naked skin, the knife touching her stomach, and blood circling the drain. While this seems rather tame compared to today’s standards, nothing quite like this had been released in the mainstream before, and people didn’t know what to make of it.
Hopkins recalled watching the movie when it came out in an interview with Vulture. “When it first came out in Manchester on a wet September evening and I was knocked out by it. That was the most terrifying film I’d ever seen. I couldn’t believe it: Where’s Janet Leigh? She’s got to come back. She’s the star of the movie! I thought she perhaps escaped from the trunk of the car. So I’ve been watching these films over the years, long before I knew I was going to play him.”
The way that Hitchcock toyed with audiences was revolutionary. Never before had a movie killed off its protagonist halfway through the film, and people truly couldn’t believe that the director would do that. Yet, Hitchcock was a trailblazer, and without him, cinema would likely look very different.
