Hannibal Lecter

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.

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.
• 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.