Hannibal Lecter

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I used to get a bit miffed whenever I heard people say that films, and especially film adaptations, stunt people’s imagination. The argument went: if you read a book, you imagine what people look and sound like, but then you watch the movie of the book and your imagination gets fixed: Alan Grant looks like Sam Neill, Annie Wilkes is the spitting image of Kathy Bates, Michael Corleone could easily be mistaken for a young Al Pacino. No more freedom of the imagination, no more imagination: you read the lines, and you see and hear the actor who made the role famous on the big screen.

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There was a time when I thought that movie and TV storytelling should just keep away from serial killers for the next, oh, several decades? It’s not because of the horrific subject matter, it’s more that serial killers had become stale in the decade following Silence of the Lambs. The writing was usually lazy, the performances showy but empty, the genre as flat as a glass of Chianti left out in the open overnight. Every return to the psycho well brought with itself diminishing returns, to the point where even the Chef of them all, good old Hannibal Lecter, had been turned into a camp ham, barely any more frightening than the third rubber skeleton from the left in a tacky haunted house ride.

It was David Fincher’s underrated Zodiac (2007) that changed my opinion: here was a film about a serial killer that didn’t rehearse the same tropes. Instead, it told a different story, about the people who, looking for some sort of meaning, for the solution to what they think of as a puzzle, are sucked into the emptiness at the centre of these crimes – and, in some cases, consumed by it. A story where the serial killer isn’t the only one who is obsessed.

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