This past month I have explored our love affair with horror movie villains ranging from ancient vampires, to ghostly urban legends, to tortured teenage misfits. Each of these figures represent something that touches on a particular human fear. From the taboo outsider to the community sin to the simple fear that something once bitten will eventually bite back. Choosing a the final villain of this month to coincide with Halloween is no easy task. So I have to ask myself, and answer as honestly as possible: what scares me most?
I think one thing that many people fear but don’t often talk about is the fear that we feel of ourselves. Flaws we can’t fix, memories we would rather forget, bad habits we can’t break. So what if there was a force in the world that could perceive all of those things without us revealing any of it? And what if that same force were able to coerce us into doing something or becoming someone we would rather not be? And what if that force were another person?
Enter our villain of the week: Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
You will be happy to know that Hannibal Lecter is actually based on a real person. Before Thomas Harris became a writer, he actually worked as a crime reporter and visited a prison in Mexico. He was supposed to interview a doctor about a different prisoner there. When he went to the prison office he met Dr. Salazar, a handsome, charming and intelligent man who had been working with the prisoner Harris was there to meet. The doctor asked a few probing questions about the prisoner and Harris’ own career as a journalist. Harris found himself charmed and a little bit disturbed by the conversation. Before leaving the prison he asked a few of the orderlies about Dr. Salazar (not his real name). Appalled they answered him, “Dr. Salazar is an inmate, he was known for putting his victims in surprisingly small boxes. He will never ever leave here.” He was released in the early 2000s but don’t worry, he died of prostate cancer in 2008.
This interaction frightened Thomas Harris so deeply because it was this idea of an insidious evil hiding in plain sight, a monster who doesn’t look like a monster at first glance. In Harris’ first two novels, Lecter only appears sparingly, as an insidious voice in the wings ready to probe at your worst memories and darkest desires. The implication is almost that the villain isn’t Hannibal Lecter, the villain is what he can bring out of you that you might not be aware was there in the first place.
I’m not going to get into the third and fourth novels, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising because I don’t want to and I don’t believe they add anything of value to the character. Hannibal works best the less we know about him. That adage goes for all horror. The monster we imagine is more terrifying than anything we are capable of perceiving with our own eyes. We don’t need to know Hannibal Lecter’s childhood trauma and personally I’d rather not. Even the other characters say that he is more monster than mad man and in the Silence of the Lambs Anthony Hopkins played up the monster side to great critical fanfare. It’s no secret to say that Hannibal Lecter’s greatest weapon is his mouth. He’s a cannibal and our most common image is of him in the famous bite guard mask. But it’s his words and his incite that cut the deepest. We don’t see Lecter commit a single act of violence until the movie is nearly over, but we hear him use his words as knives and we see the damage they do.
(Yes I am only using images of Mads Mikkelsen, I don’t care. this is my article and I’ll be thirsty if I want to.)
2012’s three season Hannibal tv show gave us a new twist on the classic book and movie villain. Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, little known in the US at the time, played Hannibal as a Lucifer figure hidden behind a human facade. The show explores Hannibal’s frankly bizarre brand of evil in ways the movie and even the books weren’t able to. Characters repeatedly say that he does have empathy and just chooses not to use it. We see him cry to opera and then cut out a girls lungs. He thinks that life is precious but he takes it upon himself to decide who gets to keep theirs. His parents were eaten when he was a kid and then he was force fed his sister, but he claims that nothing happened to him. He’s not so much a villain as he is a monster who is just doing what he was programmed to do. And worst of all, through David Slade’s stunning cinematography and Bryan Fuller‘s poetic writing, the murders on the show look beautiful, the food that we KNOW is people looks delicious and Hannibal as played by Mads Mikkelsen is sexy as fuck. It makes the audience complicit just as Hannibal himself does with those around him. His power is turning a mirror toward us and making us confront our own inner monster.
So, to close out our horror villain of the month series, some advice for you from the mouth of Hannibal Lecter himself: “I am much weirder than you will ever be. It’s fine to be weird.” Speak for yourself man, at least I don’t eat people.
