I'm pretty sure Silence of the Lambs influenced the design and casting of the Dana Scully character. In both Silence of the Lambs and the X-Files pilot episod

I'm pretty sure Silence of the Lambs influenced the design and casting of the Dana Scully character. In both Silence of the Lambs and the X-Files pilot episode, you have young women with shoulder-length red hair starting their new job at the FBI investigating the death of women, including the examination of corpses (Dana Scully specializes in forensic pathology while the examination of corpses is more incidental to Clarice Starling's work, but is a very memorable scene in the movie.)