10 Famous Horror Movie Moments That Were Completely Improvised

The Silence Of The Lambs was not the first Hannibal Lecter movie, but it was the one that established the character as one of the all-time great movie monsters (winning a rare horror movie acting Oscar along the way). Much of that is down to Anthony Hopkins's superb performance of caged menace.

Hopkins brought a lot to the role of the urbane cannibal, including some things that weren't in the script. In the scene in which he puts on a mocking impression of Jodie Foster's Southern accent, for example, that was a decision made by Hopkins on the spot. Foster's offended, defensive reaction is authentic, as she had not been expecting Hopkins to go there.

In fact, Foster said that she had found Hopkins genuinely scary during the filming of those scenes, something that gave their iconic interplay an additional frisson.

Most memorably, Hopkins added a bizarre hissing noise after delivering Lecter's famous line about eating someone's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti. Watching the scene you can even see Hopkins pause between saying "Chianti" and the hiss, giving director Jonathan Demme a chance to cut if he wanted.

Demme (and Foster for that matter) found that the animalistic hissing hit just the right unsettling tone for the imprisoned monster, though, and left the ad-lib in. And it's good that he did, because it's this random noise as much as any of his sophisticated bon mots that define Hopkins's Lecter in the popular imagination. It's hard to think of a reference or parody without it.