and People magazine. The Silence of the Lambs was selected as the best suspense/thriller and Dr. Hannibal Lecter was selected as the fourth-greatest film character. The film and its characters have appeared in the following AFI "100 Years" lists: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – #65 AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills – #5 AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains: Clarice Starling – #6 Hero Hannibal Lecter – #1 Villain Buffalo Bill - Nominated Villain AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes: "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti." – #21 AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #74 In 2015, Entertainment Weeklys 25th anniversary year, it included The Silence of the Lambs in its list of the 25 best movies made since the magazine's beginning. Home media The film was released on VHS in October 1991 by Orion Home Video. It was the most rented video in the United States upon release. It was released on DVD on March 6, 2001 by MGM Home Entertainment in both Widescreen (1.85:1) and Full Screen (1.33:1) versions. The Criterion Collection, which had released the film on LaserDisc in 1994, released a DVD special edition in 1998, and later a Blu-Ray edition in 2018. Legacy According to The Guardian, before The Silence of the Lambs, serial killers in film had been "claw-handed bogeymen with melty faces and rubber masks. By contrast, Lecter was highly intelligent with impeccable manners," and played by an actor with "impeccable credentials". When The Silence of the Lambs was re-released in the United Kingdom in 2017, the British Board of Film Classification reclassified it from an 18 to a 15 certificate. The film's co-producer Ed Saxon said audiences had become desensitized and that the film had become less shocking. However, the BBFC's Craig Lapper felt that audiences had instead become used to procedural crime dramas with serial killers as dramatic tropes, and suggested that The Silence of the Lambs had created interest in these themes. See also Clarice, sequel TV series List of Academy Award records List of films based on crime books Silence! The Musical, an unauthorized parody musical adaptation of the film References Sources External links The Silence of the Lambs an essay by Amy Taubin at the Criterion Collection 1990s English-language films 1990s psychological horror films 1990s serial killer films 1991 films 1991 crime drama films 1991