The superbly crafted suspense thriller that director Jonathan Demme has made from Thomas Harris's taut best-selling novel The Silence of the Lambs slams you like a sudden blast of bone-chilling, pulse-pounding terror.

The stable yields a stercorarious heap Impregnated with quick fermenting salts, And potent to resist the freezing blast.

The Bat—they called him the Bat. Like a bat he chose the night hours for his work of rapine; like a bat he struck and vanished, pouncingly, noiselessly; like a bat he never showed himself to the face of the day.

The spacial depths between the glittering threads of the web and the chef seemed abysmic and prodigious. He might have belonged to another realm.