ISSUE #12: The Moths from 'The Silence of the Lambs' Are Real, and They Scream

And they have an appropriately spooky name.

There are few movie posters more iconic than The Silence of the Lambs, and there are few movie stars as iconic as that movie’s large, charismatic moths. The film’s secondary villain, serial killer Jame Gumb, dubbed “Buffalo Bill,” breeds them inside his home and inserts a pupa inside the mouths of each of his victims. 

The film used live moths for the scenes inside Gumb’s house, and the moths themselves are a real species. They’re death’s-head hawkmoths—specifically Acherontia atropos, the African death’s-head hawkmoth, and Acherontia styx—and they really do have human skull-shaped markings on the back of their thorax. They’re members of the family Sphingidae, a group colloquially known as both hawkmoths and sphinx moths, containing some of the largest and heftiest moths around. They can grow as big as your hand and different species vary in coloration from pink to green to mottled brown and black, and they’re found all over, mainly in tropical regions of the world. 

The poster for the movie features one of these moths with its wings spread over Jodie Foster’s mouth, its skull marking fully displayed. The skull on the poster, while accurate to the species of moth, has been digitally enhanced: If you zoom in, the skull is formed by the nude bodies of seven women, an homage to “In Voluptas Mors,” a photography project by Philippe Halsman and Salvador Dalí (which also appears on the poster for The Descent).