Britney Spears loves dropping videos of herself dancing on Instagram. My favorite part of clicking on them is the anticipation before I find out what music she’s chosen because she’s all over the board. Lately we’ve gotten everything from Bruce Springsteen songs to Seal songs to Britney’s own songs. I’m rarely surprised anymore, as I’ve stopped going in with any preconceived notions, but even so, I still did an immediate mouth open, shocked double take when I clicked on her last video and it was set to Q Lazzarus’ “Goodbye Horses.”
If the name of that song sounds vaguely familiar to you it’s almost certainly because you’ve heard it in The Silence Of The Lambs. It’s the track Buffalo Bill dances to while tucking and wearing a woman’s scalp as a wig. It’s one of the most unnerving and iconic scenes in one of the best movies ever made, and now we have a video of Britney Spears dancing in a crop top set to the song. It’s weird and amazing and I feel like my fandoms are uniting and crashing together in an unexpected way. You can check out the video below…
So, first of all, I have no idea if Britney Spears realizes this video is giving Silence Of The Lambs to a lot of people watching. I can’t find any record of her talking about the movie, and there’s reason to believe this may have just been a happy accident. She recently re-posted a dance group performing with “Goodbye Horses” in the background and may have simply thought, hey, that song rules. I’m going to put it on one of my dance videos. So, maybe she just heard the song and couldn’t get enough, which would make sense since it’s sooooooo good. Besides, if she is a Silence Of The Lambs fan, I can’t imagine her dropping this video and not making some reference to the iconic scene shown below.
Either way, “Goodbye Horses” is a spectacular song with a truly bizarre history. Jonathan Demme, who directed Philadelphia, Stop Making Sense and a bunch of other awesome movies and concert videos, got picked up by a taxi during a snowstorm. The driver was Q Lazzarus, a struggling musician. She played him a demo of her music, and he wound up using it in a bunch of his movies including “Goodbye Horses” in Silence Of The Lambs, which we recently put on our list of best music moments in the history of horror movies.
As for Britney Spears herself, she’s been the subject of a thousand and one tabloid rumors over the last few months about everything from her marriage to her sleeping habits to her relationship with her parents and ex-husband. Throughout it all, however, she’s just kept living and dropping more fun dance videos set to a variety of random songs. Hopefully this one convinces many to discover Q Lazzarus and to go watch The Silence Of The Lambs.
