Goofs

(at around 19 mins) When agent Starling has her first interview with Hannibal Lecter she is wearing colored nail polish. A shot of her hands after she runs out of the prison shows she is no longer wearing the nail polish.

(at around 1h 22 mins) When the police officer (actually Dr. Lecter) is on the stretcher in the elevator, several drops of blood come down from the ceiling, clearly staining the sheet. When the stretcher is wheeled out of the elevator, no blood stains are visible.

(at around 1h 35 mins) When the FBI team is preparing to deliver the flowers, the ribbon is on both the upper and lower sections of the box. In the next shot, the ribbon appears only on the upper section of the box.

(at around 24 mins) When Starling tries to get into the self-storage facility, the gloves disappear from her lap.

At the very beginning of Lecter's escape scene, he is down in a corner of the cage and kicks the metal cage gate into the officer's face, it then bounces back to lecter's side. A quick cut later, we can see a POV shot of lecter's victim, with the latter attacking to bite his face off : the gate, that should be in between them, is nowhere to be seen.

(at around 1h 55 mins) In the closing credits, thanks is given to The "Behavorial" Science Unit. The correct spelling is behavioral.

(at around 21 mins) Crawford tells Clarice that Miggs died by swallowing his tongue after Hannibal said something that made him cry. Literally swallowing one's tongue is impossible. However, an unconscious person's tongue may sag backwards and block their airway, leading to suffocation. This is what is usually referred to by the phrase. It is not a voluntary act.

West Virginia State Police uniforms have been forest green since the early 1900s. Their vehicles are blue with Old Gold and the State Seal on the door. The director asked the WV Department of Public Safety to use some State Police in the movie, but he didn't like the colors of their uniforms. When he asked them to change into the Brown uniforms, they refused and left the set.

(at around 48 mins) The biologist identifies the moth found behind the murder victim's soft palate as Acherontia styx, the Deaths Head moth. The Deaths Head moth used in the poster is actually Acherontia atropos. (A third Deaths Head moth is called Acherontia lachesis.) While A. styx is native to Asia, as identified by the biologist, A. atropos is native to the Middle East and Mediterranean.

After Starling figures out Lector was using an anagram when he was asked Buffalo Bill's real name, she refers to iron sulfide as "fools gold." The correct compound is iron pyrite. Also, iron pyrite is a type of sulfide but the terms are not interchangeable.

(at around 9 mins) During Clarice's first visit to see Hannibal, she wore a skirt with belt on the waist when she was in Dr. Chilton's office and before entering the final corridor leading to Hannibal's cell. The belt was gone when she entered the corridor. She probably had to remove her belt before entering the maximum-security area, particularly if it had a metal buckle.

(at around 1h 50 mins) During the end credits, watching Hannibal as he walks up the busy street, just as the credit for "Roden" is about to scroll past him, his hat blows off and someone helps him pick it up. Only really visible on HD versions.

Amazingly, sometimes the wind blows people's hats off, and people will help them get their hat back.

(at around 55 mins) Lecter correctly refers to the moth pupa as a "chrysalis". Many moths, including the one in the film, pupate inside a chrysalis. "Cocoon" refers to a type of silky case spun by many types of insects, not just moths.

(at around 1h 30 mins) U.S. Customs has a record of Buffalo Bill bringing the moths, found only in Asia, from Suriname, in South America. He may have used a re-shipper to disguise the shipment's origins.

(at around 1h 27 mins) When Clarice is shown in Belvedere, Ohio, she is on a bridge. Belvedere is not on a river, but Cross Creek runs through the town.

(at around 44 mins) As Forensics comes to take photos of the victim's body, the "corpse" visibly blinks as hands touch its face.

(at around 21 mins) When Clarice is researching Lecter in Quantico by reading old newspaper articles on microfilm, the same text regarding developments at some vague governmental conference appears over and over again surrounding the Lecter articles in all four separate newspapers she views.

The same newspaper clipping from the National Inquisitor with the headline "Bill Skins Fifth" appears on the wall of Jack Crawford's office at the beginning of the film, and on the wall of Buffalo Bill's trophy room at the end. The text of the article is actually not about Buffalo Bill at all: it is the story of how Hannibal Lecter was arrested for a "brutal murder" in which "reportedly acts of cannibalism were a factor in the death". The victim, named as Stuart Heart, is inconsistently described as a museum curator, as an entymologist, and as the creator of a liver disease drug. The story includes a quote from "Special Agent Jack Crawford".

The story's text can be seen in its proper place during Clarice's research on the microfiche, in the Washington Dispatch story headlined "Renowned Psychiatrist Charged in Murder".

(at around 1h 30 mins) As Clarice finds the pictures hidden in the music box's lid, the pitch of the notes becomes lower as the tempo slows, as if the music was on a vinyl record. In contrast, as the scene ends and she exits the bedroom, the tempo slows gradually but the pitch remains unchanged, which is what would happen with a real music box.

When Clarice is interviewing Lecter, a padlock on his cell door goes from locked to unlocked between scenes.

When Clarice is first speaking to Wild Bill and the moth lands on the spools of string, there is a visible string tied to the moth.

(at around 1h 40 mins) A black string is attached to the back of the moth that lands on the red roll of string at Buffalo Bill's house. Presumably the shot was filmed in reverse, and the moth was yanked off the reel.

(at around 1h 4 mins) When Hannibal is imprisoned in Memphis, the sign outside the Shelby County courthouse is shown, in dim light, to be a museum.

(at around 1h 30 mins) The plane carrying agents to Calumet City banks over mountainous terrain that looks like nothing near northern Indiana or northern Illinois.

(at around 1h 30 mins) The military aircraft heading toward Calument City has California Air Guard on the side, which is not likely for planes coming from Virginia.

Jack Crawford and his men are storming the house in Calumet City, IL around the same time Clarice figures out who the real Buffalo Bill is in Belvedere, OH, which is in the southeastern corner of the state. Yet Jack and his men show up in Belvedere what seems like a short time after Clarice discovered Buffalo Bill. How did they get there so quickly? The drive time to (mostly likely O'Hare) and the flight time plus getting ground transport to Belvedere would have taken four hours, minimum.

(at around 48 mins) When Clarice visits the entomologists to identify the moth pupa, they say while examining the chrysalis that it must've been specially raised from imported eggs and fed "honey and nightshade". Deaths Head moth larvae, like most caterpillars, eat only vegetation; the adult moths eat honey.

(at around 42 mins) The autopsy scene contains at least eight errors. Among them, the body was fingerprinted without collecting evidence under the victim's fingernails, and the ink would have destroyed the evidence. You cannot get fingerprints from a body in that condition.

When Sgt. Tate and other officers enter Lecter's cell during his escape, Tate appears to be the only one who notices Lt. Boyle, dead and strung up to the cell, all the others are looking around the room and seem oblivious to him.

(at around 56 mins) Clarice says that, after being sent away by the family she lived with on the ranch, she had to live in an orphanage. Montana, like most states, transitioned from orphanages to a foster care system well before 1970, when Clarice would have been a child.

Crawford sends Clarice to interview Lecter without explicitly telling her that it is to get information on the Buffalo Bill case. He explains that he did so because Lecter would have been able to tell from Starling's behavior that this was the goal, and he would have been uncooperative. However, after telling Starling this, he sends her to make a false offer of a transfer to Lecter. Starling seems to have been in on this, as "Anthrax Island" is an element that Lecter correctly surmises was her invention.