Hannibal Lecter

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Lore & Background

Hannibal Lecter is a cannibalistic serial killer, who was born in Lithuania. A child of Lithuanian nobility and of the Visconti and Sforza families of Italy, 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'. 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' ('pure psychopath' in the film adaptation). 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.

In Their Own Story

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.

Reader's Guide

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' (a 'big Amarone' in the novel). Prior to his capture and imprisonment, he was a member of Baltimore'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.

Did You Know?

• Lecter first appeared in a small role as a villain in Harris' 1981 thriller novel Red Dragon.
• Anthony Hopkins won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Lecter in the 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs.
• In 2003, Lecter, as portrayed by Hopkins, was named the greatest villain in American cinema by the American Film Institute.
• Mads Mikkelsen won the Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television for his performance as Lecter in the NBC series Hannibal (2013–2015).
• Lecter was inspired by a real-life Mexican surgeon and convicted murderer named Alfredo Ballí Treviño, whom Thomas Harris met while working as a journalist.