Lessons from Hannibal Lecter: How to Write a Human Monster
Can horror be scary without the supernatural?
Poster image for Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001).
What’s so scary about Hannibal Lecter anyway?
He can’t float through your bedroom window or break through walls. He can’t sprout tentacles, drag you to Hell, hunt you in your dreams, or throttle you with telekinesis. Bullets are a grave inconvenience to him, and he would never be so uncouth as to pick up a chainsaw.
He’s just a man, “a small, lithe man. Very neat.”
So how did premier thriller/horror author Thomas Harris make a character with no supernatural powers so damn scary? How can any writer make us fear a monster so seemingly banal?
Demon psychiatrist Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter is the star of three Harris bestsellers, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999) and an unloved prequel Hannibal Rising (2006).
Brian Cox was the first to play him on screen in Michael Mann’s neon-drenched nightmare Manhunter (1986). Cox plays Lecter with subtlety, perhaps too much subtlety for us to see the monster he truly is. It was Anthony Hopkins who immortalised the character as the bug-eyed Mephistopheles wheedling a Faustian bargain out of Jodie Foster in Jonathan Demme’s quintuple-Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Hopkins’s Lecter was canonised by the American Film Institute as the greatest villain in US cinema history (ahead of Norman Bates and Darth Vader), his prison-issue muzzle now as iconic as Jason’s hockey-mask or Fred Krueger’s backscratcher…
