Hannibal Lecter
Dr. Hannibal Lecter is a character created by American novelist Thomas Harris. Lecter is a cannibalistic serial killer and former forensic psychiatrist; after his incarceration, he is consulted by FBI agents Will Graham and Clarice Starling to help them find other serial killers.
Lecter first appeared in a small role as a villain in Harris' 1981 thriller novel Red Dragon, which was adapted into the film Manhunter, with Brian Cox as Lecter. Lecter had a larger role in The Silence of the Lambs ; the 1991 film adaptation starred Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Hopkins reprised the role for the 2001 adaptation of the 1999 novel Hannibal, which sees Lecter evading recapture, and for a second adaptation of Red Dragon in 2002.
The fourth novel, Hannibal Rising, explores Lecter's childhood and development into a serial killer. He was played in the 2007 film adaptation by Gaspard Ulliel. In the NBC television series Hannibal, which focuses on Lecter's relationship with Graham, Lecter was played by Mads Mikkelsen, who won the Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television for his performance.
In 2003, Lecter, as portrayed by Hopkins, was named the greatest villain in American cinema by the American Film Institute. In 2010, Entertainment Weekly named him one of the 100 greatest characters of the preceding 20 years. In 2019, Lecter, as portrayed by Mikkelsen, was named the 18th greatest villain in television history by Rolling Stone.
Inspiration
Working as a journalist for Argosy magazine in the 1960s, Thomas Harris traveled to Mexico to interview an American mental patient, Dykes Askew Simmons, who was being detained at Nuevo León State Prison in Monterrey for three murders. While jailed, Simmons had been shot by a prison guard, once in each calf, and he was treated by a skilled "prison-doctor" whom Harris had referred to as "Dr. Salazar". Harris described him as a "small, lithe man with dark red hair" who "stood very still" with "a certain elegance about him"; their interview eventually took a dark turn, Harris said, when Salazar started talking about "the nature of torment". A prison guard later informed Harris that Salazar was, in fact, a convicted murderer who could "package his victim in a surprisingly small box". Salazar inspired Harris to create a character with a "peculiar understanding of the criminal mind".Salazar is believed to be Alfredo Ballí Treviño, the last criminal to be condemned to death in Mexico, in 1959. Ballí was a surgeon and physician from an upper-class family who had murdered his colleague and lover, Jesus Castillo Rangel. Ballí had held a towel soaked in chloroform over Rangel’s face, causing him to lose consciousness; Ballí then transferred the body to an adjacent bathroom where he slit Rangel’s throat and drained his body completely of blood before dismembering his corpse. Ballí is suspected of killing and dismembering several hitchhikers in the countryside during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Harris incorporated some of these details into Buffalo Bill's development as a killer in The Silence of the Lambs.
In her book Evil Serial Killers, Charlotte Greig asserts Lecter was inspired at least in part by the serial killer Albert Fish. Greig also states that, to explain Lecter's pathology, Harris borrowed the possibly apocryphal story of serial killer and cannibal Andrei Chikatilo's brother Stepan being kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbors. The location of the book Hannibal was inspired by the Monster of Florence and, while preparing the book, Harris traveled to Italy and was present at the trial of the main suspect, Pietro Pacciani.
Character
Hannibal Lecter is a child of Lithuanian nobility and of the Visconti and Sforza families of Italy, and he is also a cannibalistic serial killer. He is highly intelligent and cultured, with refined tastes and impeccable manners. He is deeply offended by rudeness, and often kills people who exhibit bad manners; according to the novel Hannibal, he "prefers to eat the rude". Hopkins described Lecter as the "Robin Hood of killers", who kills "the terminally rude".In the novel Red Dragon, the protagonist, Will Graham, says that psychologists refer to Lecter as a sociopath "because they don't know what else to call him". Graham says "he has no remorse or guilt at all", and tortured animals as a child, but he does not exhibit any of the other criteria traditionally associated with sociopathy. Asked how he himself would describe Lecter, Graham responded, "he's a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don't put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell."
In The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter's keeper, Dr. Frederick Chilton, claims that Lecter is a "pure sociopath". In the film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs, protagonist Clarice Starling says of Lecter, "They don't have a name for what he is". Lecter's pathology is explored in greater detail in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, which explains that he was traumatized as a child in Lithuania in 1944 when he witnessed his beloved sister, Mischa, being murdered and cannibalized by a group of deserting Lithuanian Hilfswillige, one of whom claimed that Lecter unwittingly ate his sister as well.
All media in which Lecter appears portray him as intellectually brilliant, cultured and sophisticated, with refined tastes in art, music and cuisine. He is frequently depicted preparing gourmet meals from his victims' flesh, the most famous example being his admission that he once ate a census taker's liver "with some fava beans and a nice Chianti". Prior to his capture and imprisonment, he was a member of Baltimore, Maryland's social elite, and a sitting member of the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra's Board of Directors.
In the novel The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter is described through Starling's eyes: "She could see that he was small, sleek; in his hands and arms she saw wiry strength like her own." The novel also reveals that Lecter's left hand has a rare condition called mid-ray duplication polydactyly, i.e. a duplicated middle finger. In Hannibal, he performs plastic surgery on his own face on several occasions, and removes his extra digit. Lecter's eyes are a shade of maroon, and reflect the light in "pinpoints of red". He has small white teeth and dark, slicked-back hair with a widow's peak. He also has a keen sense of smell; in Red Dragon, he immediately recognizes Will Graham by his brand of aftershave, and in The Silence of the Lambs, he is able to identify through a plexiglass window with small holes the brand of perfume that Starling wore the day before. He has an eidetic memory with which he has constructed in his mind an elaborate "memory palace" to relive memories and sensations in rich detail.
According to The Guardian, before The Silence of the Lambs, films portrayed psychopathic killers as "claw-handed bogeymen with melty faces and rubber masks. By contrast, Lecter was highly intelligent with impeccable manners." Anthony Hopkins, the actor most closely identified with Lecter, said he played him as "ultra sane, very still... He has such terrifying physical power, and he doesn't waste an ounce of energy. He's so contained. He's all brain." His performance was inspired by HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The critic Roger Ebert elaborated on this comparison: "He is a dispassionate, brilliant machine, superb at logic, deficient in emotions." In the same essay, Ebert wrote:
One key to the film's appeal is that audiences like Hannibal Lecter...He may be a cannibal, but as a dinner party guest he would give value for money. He does not bore, he likes to amuse, he has his standards, and he is the smartest person in the movie... He bears comparison, indeed, with such other movie monsters as Nosferatu, Frankenstein... King Kong and Norman Bates. They have two things in common: They behave according to their natures, and they are misunderstood. Nothing that these monsters do is "evil" in any conventional moral sense, because they lack any moral sense. They are hard-wired to do what they do. They have no choice. In the areas where they do have choice, they try to do the right thing.
Appearances
Novels
''Red Dragon''
In the backstory of the 1981 novel Red Dragon, FBI profiler Will Graham interviews Lecter about one of his patients who was murdered by a serial killer, before intuiting that Lecter is the culprit; he sees the antique medical diagram "Wound Man" in Lecter's office, and remembers that the victim suffered the same injuries depicted in the drawing. Realizing that Graham is on to him, Lecter creeps up behind Graham and stabs him with a linoleum knife, nearly disemboweling him.Graham survives, but is so traumatized by the incident that he takes early retirement from the FBI. Lecter is charged with a series of nine murders, but is found not guilty by reason of insanity. He is institutionalized in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane under the care of Dr. Frederick Chilton, a pompous, incompetent psychologist whom he despises, and who subjects him to a series of petty cruelties.
Some years later, Graham comes out of retirement and consults Lecter in order to catch another serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde, known by the nickname "the Tooth Fairy". Through the classifieds of a tabloid called The National Tattler, Lecter provides Dolarhyde with Graham's home address; Dolarhyde later uses this information to break into Graham's home, stab him in the face, and threaten his family before Graham's wife Molly shoots him dead. At the end of the novel, Lecter sends Graham a letter, saying that he hopes Graham "won't be very ugly".