Selling “Silence Of The Lambs” Killer’s House Not As Easy As You’d Think

silenceoflambshouseAs we saw with the prolonged attempt to sell Cameron’s house from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, having your property featured in a famous movie is no guarantee that it will be snatched up at a good price. Just ask the owners of the Pennsylvania home used in the Oscar-winning horror film Silence of the Lambs.

Director Jonathan Demme used the quaint home on the outskirts of tiny Perryopolis, PA, to film some of the movie’s final standoff, where [spoiler alert for those who have somehow managed to not see this movie, or have it spoiled, at some point in the last 25 years] Jodie Foster’s FBI agent-in-training Clarice Starling unwittingly stumbles across murderer Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, played by Ted Levine.

While the tense early part of the sequence was indeed filmed inside the home’s entryway and kitchen, the subsequent chase through its basement was not. Which is a way of saying that this house does not contain a sub-basement starvation pit where a buyer could prep a victim before her eventual flaying.

Perhaps that’s why the home has had difficulty attracting an interested buyer since it went on sale last year. The homeowners, who have owned the house for 40 years, tell the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that they have received a lot of calls from curious fans of the 1991 movie that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, along with one for its screenplay.

The home was originally listed for $300,000, but it’s recently been dropped to $250,000. Even so, that may be a high price for a one-bathroom house in remote western Pennsylvania, an hour away from Pittsburgh.

A look through real estate sites for this area shows other homes going for significantly less than even the reduced asking price for the (in)famous film set.

However, the homeowners say that bona fide potential buyers are starting to show interest.

“We got the message out to the curious, but not to the people who are interested in actually buying,” the husband tells the Tribune-Review. “We’re finally starting to get a little bit of motion.”

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