ABSTRACT
Thomas Harris’ 1981 Red Dragon introduced readers to highly intelligent, articulate and cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, albeit in his first outing restricted to his prison cell and serving as a reluctant consultant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation profiler who captured him, Will Graham. Bryan Fuller’s serialized television (TV) series Hannibal stands as the sixth licensed text drawn from Harris’ work, albeit one that presents itself as a prequel as well as an adaptation. This chapter examines how Hannibal operates as an example of Jason Mittell’s notion of “complex TV”, complicating audience expectations of the Lecter stories, the serial killer genre and network TV, alongside the conventions of Gothic horror. In the film The Silence of the Lambs, director Jonathan Demme transforms Harris’ bloodbath into a spectacular and horrific tableau. While mise en scene of Hannibal is structured around a layering of referents from its literary and cinematic precursors, series also self-consciously reimagines characters familiar from books and films.
