Reading Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs means getting transported, for the duration, into a very dark continent - a place marked on the mind's map with the old warning 'HERE BE MONSTERS.' In Thomas Harris' riveting fictions one keeps chilling company with a bizarre breed of secret sharers: serial killers who hanker after grotesque transubstantiation in their victims' flesh and blood, and the bent souls who hunt them. The novelist's most potent and disturbing creature, the Mabusian heart of both Dragon and Lambs, is Dr. Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, who combines a scarcely human ancestor's appetites and "magical" thinking with the genius of an artist-scientist. The soul of this sociopathic psychiatrist and butcher might be the result of a hellish grafting of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Mengele - if Lecter didn't so thoroughly resist known similes. He might be a modern mutation, a thing ahead of its time. Caged through most of Dragon and Lambs, Lecter is consulted by cops as an oracle, and acts as high priest to those acolytes who strive, as he has, to transform themselves, triggering their evolution in rites of human sacrifice.
     Harris' novels - along with his harrowing shrink - have been unusually well served by their cinematic conversions: Michael Mann's brooding Manhunter (1986), from Red Dragon, and now Jonathan Demme's dynamic The Silence of the Lambs. While remarkably true to their sources, these films bear the unmistakable signatures of their directors; they look and move very differently.
     Mann's mirrored mise-en-scene is a closed system where souls are caught and exposed frame by frame, with only the illusion of change or exit. Here, even a slight rack in focus can blur and erase the boundaries of identity. Manhunter is dominated by a trinity of males, a perverse father, son, and holy ghost: Hannibal Lecter, whose hunt and capture - sometime before the onset of the narrative - temporarily cost FBI agent Will Graham his sanity; Francis Dollarhyde, a Lecter avatar and the object of Graham's latest dangerous game; and Graham himself, whose specialty is stalking serial killers by getting inside their mindsets.
     In contrast, The Silence of the Lambs finds and forges character in motion, from first shot to last. In the course of its narrative drive, another of Lecter's lost sons strives to shape a brand-new self out of multiple murders, while the woman cop who pursues him is taken in hand by opposing fathers - one of them the horrific Hannibal - and unexpectedly parented into discovering her true nature. Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs are separated by the distance between determinism and free will; Mann's truths are mined out of meditation, Demme's in momentum.

Appropriately, it's Hannibal Lecter who provides the stylistic epigraph for Manhunter: "We don't invent our natures." After that original frameup in the world that Michael Mann makes, the signatures of identity, lunatic or sane, are reflected everywhere one moves, inviting access and violation. The spoor of Francis Dollarhyde remains in videotaped images, a fingerprint on an eye, a smear of blood on a wall, the marks of teeth in flesh. Every aspect of this primitive performance art is analyzed by a battery of high-tech wizards, but it's Will Graham's ability to turn doppleganger - catching Dollarhyde's dark shadow in the mirror of his own psyche - that finally brings the killer down.
     The towering, cleft-lipped Dollarhyde (brilliantly played by Tom Noonan) gives off at times the doomed sweetness of Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster, but Manhunter's Lecter, as incarnated by Irish actor Brian Cox, is a stone killer. Cox's bony-faced raptor uses the arrogant nasality of his voice - sometimes laced with vulgar bonhomie - to abrade away all resistance. When Will Graham (William L. Petersen) visits Lecter in his white, surgically precise cell, the FBI agent acts out a formal consultation with a respected expert in the field of serial murder. The psychiatrist turns it into a cruelly "therapeutic" session.
     While they talk Graham's face blanks, as though he were taking his quarry in through his skin, imprinting in some primal way. Lecter is on to this in a flash: "You came here to look at me...to get the old scent back." Hypnotically, he keeps insinuating a kind of incremental refrain - "Do you know how you caught me?" - into their professional chat, then, with perfect timing, climaxes by going for the jugular, that cultured voice effortlessly coarsening into the bellow of a beast: "We're just alike. You understand me. Smell yourself!"
     Through this scene's civilized overlay, as if in double exposure, one glimpses an ancient dark where two half-evolved creatures crouch on opposite sides of a fire, tasting each other in the air, gauging how much potent magic the other's flesh might contain.
     Lecter later counsels Graham that killing is pleasurable because "if one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is." The multiple murderers in both Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs are wholly tuned in to that shamanistic recipe for transfiguration. Paint one's victims on a cave wall or videotape them as Dollarhyde does, eat their parts as Lecter likes to do, or wear their skins in "Buffalo Bill"'s style, it's all the same magic. Art and religion merge, body and soul are filled and enlarged with stolen power, and one more evolutionary step toward godhood has been achieved. It's the sacrament of communion made literal.

"Advancement," in one form or another, keynotes The Silence of the Lambs. In their very first interview, Hannibal Lecter divines it's what self-created Clarice Starling craves most - though professional ambition alone doesn't fuel the young FBI trainee's subsequent progress through a kind of fast-action psychoanalysis with her vampire therapist. All the film's principal's share that dream of getting ahead. Lecter, sick of playing the sibyl, plots to get back on the road, using serial killer Buffalo Bill's latest outrage as his ticket to freedom. Only Jame Gumb - Bill - fails in his bid to move on: he lacks the nearly tragic stature and visionary imagination of Manhunter's "Tooth Fairy"; gender-shifting, no matter how exotic the means to metamorphosis, can't compete with Dollarhyde's appetite for godhead.
     The very storytelling style of Lambs is characterized by an exhilerating sense of fated advancement - clean, efficient, straight-ahead - in which the logic and energy of each scene propels the next into being. Storyline and form are one: Clarice Starling's dogged, sweaty climb up out of a ravine to run an obstacle course toward camera in the first shot originates and is completed by Hannibal Lecter's long walk away from us at film's end. Jonathan Demme's movie works flawlessly as suspense drama, but what really stokes The Silence of the Lambs is the radical symbiosis that develops between Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal and Jodie Foster's Clarice. The relationship transcends strictly psychological definition; whatever the nature of their complex exchange, it uncages them both.
     Jodie Foster wears the character of Clarice Starling seamlessly, with the kind of rare, laser-beam intelligence that makes getting inside another human being's soul look easy. The fatherless Starling is always fighting her way up from loss, visibly shaping and armoring herself against being taken lightly. Again and again, she presents her face in closeup, dominated by those clear blue eyes and compressed lips, as though it were a brave flag under siege. With a sociopath's dead aim, Lecter zeroes in at once on her pregnability: "You look like a well-scrubbed hustling little rube...one generation removed from poor white trash." Significantly, it's not another asylum inmate's slobbering "I can smell your cunt" that unmans Starling - she's as chaste and consecrated to her calling as a young priest - but rather Lecter's acid exposure of the orphaned child within her.
     That exposure literally breaks up Starling's carefully constructed expression of confidence; Foster makes you see the cost of this girl's singleminded will and courage as she reforms her shattered features. Lecter sees it, too, and inhales Starling like some rare perfume. At this moment, it's possible that an alien species of love - depraved yet exquisite - takes root in Lecter. And after the two have struck their Mephistophelian bargain - in essence, his knowledge for a taste of her soul - Starling escapes into the light of day and the first of two flashbacks in Lambs: just a child, she is caught up in her policeman father's homecoming embrace. Does the memory arise as an antidote to horror, or as a euphemistic acknowledgement of her adoption by a monster who will become her teacher, critic, therapist, and ultimately, for one awful moment, perhaps even her lover?

Standing in cold contrast to Lecter's focused, psychopathic nurturing is the sexist and manipulative style of Starling's FBI boss, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), linked with a flashback of her father lying in his coffin. At one point during their first working session, Crawford deliberately drops her as though she were a female supernumeracy, an inconvenience at best. (One recalls Lecter's summary punishment of the "sexist" insult leveled at Starling by the maniac in the next cell.) Stripped of any professional role, Starling dwindles into disinherited child, dwarfed in a circle of flat-eyed, uniformed men. Again, Foster shows a woman forging herself from the ground up, finally reaching back to her rural Southern roots to find the face and voice that will move those Crawford had encouraged to write her off. He should be Lambs' best and sanest bet as Starling's lover or father, but he never really seems to look at her directly, to home in on the purity of her hunger. And when she is threatened with annihilation, of body or spirit, Crawford is most often the agent of abandonment.
     One could imagine Manhunter's Lecter glutting himself at table, even emitting an appreciative belch afterwards. But Anthony Hopkins' cannibal is made of finer stuff, sculpted with a more polished veneer. In him, the artist-philosopher outweighs the scientist: metaphor is as potent as the fact of flesh. He's given to play, at times to macabre irony. Propped up on display in the middle of an aircraft hangar, a grotesquely masked and bound prophet, he spews stomach-turning crudity. Yet he uses the Socratic method to instruct Clarice Starling in criminal behavior, and manages his protegee's psychological exorcism with the ease of a practiced demon-hunter.
     When Starling relates the story of the screaming lambs - a projection of her own orphaned grief - she gives up her secrets to Lecter like an offering. His face as gaunted by desire as any lover's, he savors every word in her confession: meat and drink to him, purgation for her. In closeup after closeup, and finally caught in the same frame, the two approach and achieve a transcendent intersection, a commingling more ecstatic than sexual climax, closer perhaps to dying and being born. In that strangely religious transference, Lecter gets wholly inside and knows Clarice Starling. The process of filling her terrible emptiness, of silencing the lambs for good, is completed only when, through Starling's heroic descent into an actual hell, the real child in Jame Gumb's dark pit is released.
     In the penultimate moments of The Silence of the Lambs, Jack Crawford congratulates Clarice Starling on her investiture as a full-fledged FBI agent, his hand clasping hers in a closeup that echoes her last contact with Lester: the briefest slide of his finger down hers as he passed a dossier out between cell bars. It was an image of purest frisson, more terrifyingly intimate than any full-out assault. To an aesthete who understands perfectly that less is more, that whisper of flesh marked Clarice Starling as Lecter's own, a eucharist he once celebrated and consumed. Hannibal Lecter is already reaching out to touch her one last time before moving on, even as Crawford, her hand still in his, assures her that "your father would have been proud today."