Hannibal Lecter Books vs Movies: What the Films Changed

The Red Dragon story has been filmed twice, and the two versions disagree on cast, spelling and finale. Manhunter 1986 stars William L. Petersen as Will Graham and Brian Cox as Dr. Hannibal Lecktor, with that spelling, and Tom Noonan plays the killer, who is called Francis Dollarhyde. Red Dragon 2002 stars Edward Norton as Graham, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and Ralph Fiennes as Francis Dolarhyde.

Manhunter begins after Graham has left the FBI, and it treats the earlier capture of Lecktor as backstory. Red Dragon opens in 1980 and stages that capture, with Lecter badly wounding Graham before being locked away. That choice lets the 2002 film put Hopkins at the center of the story, where Manhunter has Graham visit Lecktor in his prison cell and Lecktor secretly pass coded messages to the killer.

The endings split too. In Manhunter, Graham finds the killer's house and a shootout ends with Dollarhyde dead, Reba McClane rescued and Graham returning to his wife and son. In Red Dragon, Dolarhyde fakes his death, travels to Florida and takes Josh Graham hostage, and Molly Graham shoots him. Red Dragon then closes with Dr. Chilton telling Lecter that a young FBI trainee has come to see him, a direct hand-off to The Silence of the Lambs.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991), directed by Jonathan Demme, is built around an exchange: clues from Lecter in return for pieces of Clarice Starling's own past. Jodie Foster plays Starling, Anthony Hopkins plays Lecter and Ted Levine plays Jame Gumb, the killer the press calls Buffalo Bill. The film turned a $19 million budget into $273 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

The film's clearest set pieces are the childhood story about the lambs, the move of Lecter to a facility in Memphis, and his escape after killing his guards. The finale runs through Gumb's basement, where Catherine Martin is held in a pit and Gumb stalks Starling in the dark with night vision goggles. He gives away his position, and Starling shoots him.

The last scene is a phone call at the FBI graduation party. Lecter, free and abroad, tells Starling he will not hunt her and then begins following Dr. Chilton. That open ending is what makes a sequel possible, and it is where the clarice starling and hannibal lecter pages pick up the thread.

Hannibal 2001 ends on a cleaver scene and a plane ride, and it leaves Starling's future with the FBI open. Ridley Scott directed it ten years after the Buffalo Bill case, with Julianne Moore replacing Jodie Foster as Starling and Gary Oldman as the wealthy Mason Verger. It cost $87 million and grossed more than $350 million worldwide.

The story begins with Starling blamed for a drug raid that goes wrong. Verger, Lecter's only living victim, pushes for Lecter's capture because he wants to torture him. In Florence, Inspector Renaldo Pazzi realizes that the scholar Dr. Fell is Lecter and hopes to collect Verger's reward, but Lecter kills Pazzi first. Verger's men seize Lecter, he gets free, and Verger is left to the boars he keeps.

The finale is a dinner at which Lecter drugs Starling and her corrupt superior Paul Krendler and serves Krendler part of his own brain. When Starling turns on Lecter, he handcuffs himself to her and raises a cleaver over her wrist, then cuts his own hand instead. The film cuts to Starling safe with both hands intact, and it never shows how he got free. Lecter is last seen on a plane, offering a boy a bite of food. Of the main films, this is the one that ends with its heroine's career in doubt.

Hannibal Rising is the prequel, and it is the one film that explains Lecter instead of showing him at work. Peter Webber directed it in 2007, with Gaspard Ulliel as the adult Hannibal and Aaran Thomas as the boy. It cost $50 million and grossed about $82 million worldwide, the smallest return of the main films.

The story opens in 1944 Lithuania, where the war reaches the Lecter castle and the family flees to a hunting lodge. A Soviet tank wrecks the lodge, and Hannibal and his little sister Mischa are left with a band of looters led by Vladis Grutas. Mischa does not survive the winter. Years later Hannibal escapes the orphanage that was once his home and travels to Paris, where his aunt, Lady Murasaki (Gong Li), teaches him Japanese culture and swordsmanship.

He then hunts the gang one at a time, starting with Dortlich and Milko. Grutas kidnaps Lady Murasaki to lure him, and Hannibal kills Grutas on a houseboat after Grutas claims he ate Mischa. The boat burns, Hannibal is assumed dead, and he walks out alive to find the last man, Bronys Grentz, in Saskatchewan before settling in North America. The film is a clear case of a story with a known destination, which is the older Lecter of the other films.

In my opinion, the adaptation that earns its ending best is The Silence of the Lambs, because every clue Lecter gives Starling is paid for with a piece of her past, and the basement finale pays that debt off in the dark. Hopkins is billed second behind Foster, and it could be argued that this is the right proportion: Lecter works as a threat because he is mostly behind glass, talking.

Red Dragon, to my eye, is the most useful comparison for anyone wondering what an adaptation changes. Manhunter ends in the killer's house after Lecktor has passed coded messages from his cell that expose Graham's address, while Red Dragon moves the finale to the Graham family home and ends on the hand-off to Silence. Both are fair readings of the same story, and neither one is the other with a bigger cast.

Hannibal (2001) and Hannibal Rising are the riskier films. The 2001 film stages the Krendler dinner and the cleaver scene as set pieces, and Moore's Starling is left in an unresolved place at the end. The prequel explains Lecter and loses some of his menace by doing so. If you only watch two films to see what an adaptation changes, I would pick Manhunter and Red Dragon, back to back.