Lucrative horror franchises almost never happen by design – just ask the Dark Universe. So, when I say that Hannibal Lecter wasn’t supposed to be another Hollywood money spinner, it’s not exactly a hot take. Nor were plenty of other horror icons; from Freddy Krueger (Wes Craven only wanted to make the one film) to Jason Voorhees (who isn’t even the villain in his first movie) to Norman Bates (whose rights-holders had to wait for Hitchcock’s death to wheel him out again). We’ve seen this pattern so many times – a low budget first film makes absolute bank, and within minutes the producers are pumping out yearly sequels until audiences get fed up.
Dr Lecter didn’t quite follow that same pattern. His first onscreen appearance, in Michael Mann’s brilliant but contemporaneously ignored Manhunter is a long way from cheap-but-fun shlock. His second on screen appearance was the third and, to date, last film to win all five major Oscars. You’ve probably heard of that one.
After the gigantic success of The Silence of the Lambs, it took a decade for Lecter to re-emerge and, when he finally did in Ridley Scott’s divisive but fascinating Hannibal, it didn’t exactly scream quickie Hollywood cash grab, or that it would be the harbinger for more sequels. Largely because all the source material by then had been adapted.
Lecter isn’t the only horror icon to originate in a series of novels, but he might be the one most beholden to the novels. Robert Bloch wrote three Psycho books but only the first was adapted, and even then, with heavy changes – the later films went entirely in their own direction. Koji Suzuki’s Ring has been filmed multiple times, but the screen adaptation of his sci-fi hued direct sequel Spiral was quickly brushed under the carpet and replaced with more lank-haired ghost girl mayhem, none of which came from the literary sequels.
Hannibal Lecter has never strayed too far from Thomas Harris’ writing. Yes, there have been stark divergences in various adaptations, but, to date, the only Lecter adjacent property that has not been based on anything Harris actually wrote is the miserable 2021 TV series Clarice; and its fate would seem to be indicative of what Hollywood executives in the ‘90s knew but likely resented as they waited for a new Lecter book to adapt – that this was not a franchise that would benefit from eschewing its creator’s text.
But in the ‘90s, was it a franchise at all? That there would be a sequel to Silence certainly looked inevitable, but given the lengthy wait for Harris’ new book and the gigantic backlash when it was finally released in 1999, most filmgoers would have been forgiven for assuming that, for all his status as an icon, Lecter was not some endlessly renewable resource, but simply a central character in three vastly different auteur driven thriller adaptations.
If you watch Manhunter, Silence, and Hannibal back-to-back (or even just Silence and Hannibal given they’re the two Hopkins starring films) it is staggering how little they resemble each other. Manhunter is all heavy synths and neon-tinged ‘80s saturation. Silence is gothic, grey, and orchestral. Hannibal is a lurid operatic fever dream. These films owe little to each other or to any notion of Lecter as a franchise, largely because all three are the work of directors who are unable to be anything other than themselves. So even with the release of Hannibal in 2001, the character was not yet a franchise figure. But within two years that would change.
2002’s Red Dragon is the least interesting of the three Hopkins films in terms of what’s on screen, but it might be the most interesting in terms of what it represented for the character’s pop culture standing. Promotional interviews with the key creatives tended towards a slight defensiveness given the novel had already been adapted in Manhunter. The only real justification for this new take was the chance to get Hopkins on screen again and enjoy the subsequent box office domination. In many of those interviews, director Brett Ratner and producer Dino De Laurentiis try to suggest that it was, in fact, a noble pursuit, a chance to do the book properly after Manhunter failed to. It’s true that, on paper, Ratner’s film is closer to the book than Mann’s, but the earlier film captured its dark heart far better. Something Red Dragon failed to do because it was too busy trying to be The Silence of the Lambs version 2.0.
In the novel, protagonist Will Graham is a troubled and troubling character, an agent who is so good at getting into the heads of serial killers that he’s forced to wonder whether he, in fact, shares some of their pathology. This is also true of the Graham in Manhunter, although it must be noted that Manhunter heavily changed the bleak ending of the book, in which Graham’s stare into the abyss destroys him.
In the 2002 film, Graham is a decent, straight-laced professional, with only lip service paid to his ‘issues.’ Couple this blatant attempt to create a more ‘likeable’ hero with the myriad shots directly emulating The Silence of the Lambs and you have a film that is for more concerned with recapturing old glories than doing anything remotely individual. Interviews from the time of production outright confirm that this was the intent. And while the choice of Ratner to direct after a succession of respected auteurs raised eyebrows at the time, it makes perfect sense for what De Laurentiis wanted – a franchise film.
Dino De Laurentiis’ tortuous relationship with Lecter and the tangled rights situation it led to is the stuff of Hollywood legend. He had produced Manhunter, but after it flopped, he passed on Silence. This mistake would haunt him for the rest of his life. De Laurentiis exercised his first right of refusal to the character and started production on Hannibal almost immediately after the release of the book. He then swiftly followed it up with his second Red Dragon adaptation, only this time, after the reaction to Ridley Scott’s movie, he went for a less bold, and potentially easier to control, pair of hands.
De Laurentiis got what he paid for. Red Dragon is competent and entertaining. It boasts strong performances, most especially from Ralph Fiennes and Emily Watson. It also guts the text of its most key theme; that the gulf between ‘normal’ people and the monsters we fear is nowhere near as vast as we like to believe, if indeed it exists at all. It curtails the novel’s unsettling character study of Graham in favor of inflating Lecter’s three short scenes from the book into a starring role. It gives us a happy ending followed by an egregious set up for Silence, the kind of cheap wink that would have been unthinkable in any of the earlier films.
Red Dragon did fine, both critically and commercially, but it was not the second coming of Silence. Infamously, De Laurentiis then pushed Harris for another book to adapt – when the author refused, the producer threatened to have somebody else come up with the story. Harris acquiesced and we ended up with Lecter’s nadir – the awful Hannibal Rising. Nothing represented 2000s Hollywood cynicism more effectively than the scene where Thomas Harris’ Lucifer-esque figure of urbane and unknowable evil learns the ways of the samurai sword from his Japanese aunt before taking out his first victim with one.
The decline from Silence to Rising is staggering, but unlike other horror franchises with diminishing returns, only two films separate them. Hannibal might have been controversial, but at least it still aspired to something artful and elevated. Red Dragon did not, and thus paved the way for a film so soulless it would kill off Lecter as a viable cinematic franchise.
There’s an argument to be made that Rising’s failure was what necessitated a radical new take on the character, leading to the brilliant madness of Bryan Fuller’s cult classic television series in 2013. It was a win for the franchise even if its success was more in the reviews than the ratings. But it was also representative of the new state of affairs for Harris’ stories – they were now the kind of thing that could be reinterpreted and revived again and again, for reasons both artistic and commercial.
Before Red Dragon that wasn’t the case. And while the Lecter franchise has had both highs and lows since, it was only after that film that it could be considered a franchise at all.
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Gabriel Bergmoser is a Melbourne based author and pop culture fanatic. His first non-fiction book The Lecter Variations: A History of Hannibal is available now.
